Hadamard Products of dual Jacobi-Trudi matrices

Abstract

We study positivity properties of Hadamard products of Jacobi-Trudi matrices. Mal\'{o} proved that the Hadamard (entrywise) product of two totally positive upper-triangular Toeplitz matrices whose Toeplitz sequences are the coefficient sequences of real-rooted polynomials with nonpositive zeros is again totally positive. Sokal conjectured that this result can be strengthened to total monomial positivity for the Hadamard product of Jacobi-Trudi matrices. In this paper we show that Temperley-Lieb immanants are Schur positive for Hadamard products of Jacobi-Trudi matrices given by ribbon-like skew shapes. In particular, we affirm Sokal's conjecture for minors given by ribbon-like skew shapes. Moreover, we provide a manifestly positive Schur expansion for Temperley-Lieb immanants evaluated on the Hadamard product of Jacobi-Trudi matrices indexed by ribbons. In addition, for the ribbon case, we construct a corresponding representation, offering a representation-theoretic proof of the Schur positivity.