Noncommutative determinants, Cauchy-Binet formulae, and Capelli-type identities. I. Generalizations of the Capelli and Turnbull identities

Abstract

We prove, by simple manipulation of commutators, two noncommutative generalizations of the Cauchy-Binet formula for the determinant of a product. As special cases we obtain elementary proofs of the Capelli identity from classical invariant theory and of Turnbull's Capelli-type identities for symmetric and antisymmetric matrices.Comment: LaTeX2e, 43 pages. Version 2 corrects an error in the statements of Propositions 1.4 and 1.5 (see new Remarks in Section 4) and includes a Note Added at the end of Section 1 comparing our work with that of Chervov et al (arXiv:0901.0235