Complexity and Completeness of Immanants

Original · EN

Immanants are polynomial functions of n by n matrices attached to irreducible characters of the symmetric group Sₙ, or equivalently to Young diagrams of size n. Immanants include determinants and permanents as extreme cases. Valiant proved that computation of permanents is a complete problem in his algebraic model of NP theory, i.e., it is VNP-complete. We prove that computation of immanants is VNP-complete if the immanants are attached to a family of diagrams whose separation is Ω(nδ) for some δ>0. We define the separation of a diagram to be the largest number of overhanging boxes contained in a single row. Our theorem proves a conjecture of Buergisser for a large variety of families, and in particular we recover with new proofs his VNP-completeness results for hooks and rectangles.