On a conjecture about the µ-permanent.

Let A =( a ij ) be an n -by- n matrix. For any real µ, define the polynomial where l (s) is the number of inversions of the permutation s in the symmetric group Sn . We prove that P µ (A) is a strictly increasing function of µ ? [-1,1], for a Hermitian positive definite nondiagonal matrix A , whose graph is a tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]