Motivated by the Hadamard product of matrices we define the Hadamard product
of multivariate polynomials and study its arithmetic circuit and branching
program complexity. We also give applications and connections to polynomial
identity testing. Our main results are the following. 1. We show that
noncommutative polynomial identity testing for algebraic branching programs
over rationals is complete for the logspace counting class \ceql, and over
fields of characteristic p the problem is in \ModpL/\Poly. 2.We show an
exponential lower bound for expressing the Raz-Yehudayoff polynomial as the
Hadamard product of two monotone multilinear polynomials. In contrast the
Permanent can be expressed as the Hadamard product of two monotone multilinear
formulas of quadratic size.Comment: 20 page
