Immanant inequalities and weight spaces

Abstract

We first obtain a trace formula for immanants of generalized principal submatrix of any complex matrix based on any weight space for finite dimensional representations of the general linear group. Our trace formula contains Kostant's famous formula for immanants on $0$-weight spaces as special case. We then present a criterion for non-vanishing immanants for any generalized principal submatrix of positive definite Hermitian or nonsingular totally nonnegative matrices, which strengthened the well-known results of Schur and Stembridge. Furthermore, we present an inequality that contains Kostant, Schur and Stembridge's famous inequalities as special cases.