A note on α-permanent and loop soup

Abstract

In this paper, it is shown that $\alpha$-permanent in algebra is closely related to loop soup in probability. We give explicit expansions of $\alpha$-permanents of the block matrices obtained from matrices associated to $*$-forests, which are a special class of matrices containing tridiagonal matrices. It is proved in two ways, one is the direct combinatorial proof, and the other is the probabilistic proof via loop soup.