Linear maps preserving the matrix discriminant. An enhanced approach

Abstract

The discriminant of a square matrix is defined as a discriminant of its characteristic polynomial. In this paper we provide a description of linear maps preserving the matrix discriminant assuming that the ground field is large enough. Our description generalizes the known results to the case where the field may have a finite cardinality and its characteristic may divide the size of considered matrices. To obtain this description, we extend the approach used in our previous work on the subject and, in addition to that, introduce new invariants for the action of all bijective linear maps preserving a given polynomial, which are on independent interest and could be applied to other problems in the theory of linear preservers.