A transformation that preserves principal minors of skew-symmetric matrices

Abstract

Our motivation comes from the work of Engel and Schneider (1980). Their main theorem implies that two symmetric matrices have equal corresponding principal minors of all orders if and only if they are diagonally similar. This study was continued by Hartfiel and Loewy (1984). They found sufficient conditions under which two $n\times n$ matrices\ $A$ and $B$ have equal corresponding principal minors of all orders if and only if $B$ or its transpose $B^t$ is diagonally similar to $A$. In this paper, we give a new way to construct a pair of skew-symmetric having equal corresponding principal minors of all orders.