Trace Formulae of Characteristic Polynomial and Cayley–Hamilton's Theorem, and Applications to Chiral Perturbation Theory and General Relativity

By using combinatorics, we give a new proof for the recurrence relations of the characteristic polynomial coefficients, and we further obtain an explicit expression for the generic term of the coefficient sequence, which yields the trace formulae of the Cayley–Hamilton's theorem with all coefficients explicitly given. This implies a byproduct, a complete expression for the determinant of any finite-dimensional matrix in terms of the traces of its successive powers. And we discuss some of their applications to chiral perturbation theory and general relativity.