Additive preservers of permanent rank

Abstract

The permanent rank of a matrix $A$ is the size of the maximal square submatrix in $A$ which has a nonzero permanent. In this paper we characterize additive transformations $\hat{I}¦$ which preserve matrices of per-rank-one. Under an additional assumption that $\hat{I}¦$ is surjective or that it preserves per-rank-one in both directions we prove that $\hat{I}¦$ is a composition of a multiplication with diagonal matrices and permutation matrices from both sides, transposition, and injective endomorphism of the base field.