Sums of squares and negative correlation for spanning forests of series parallel graphs

Abstract: We provide new evidence that spanning forests of graphs satisfy the same negative correlation properties as spanning trees, derived from Lord Rayleigh's monotonicity property for electrical networks. The main result of this paper is that the Rayleigh difference for the spanning forest generating polynomial of a series parallel graph can be expressed as a certain positive sum of monomials times squares of polynomials. We also show that every regular matroid is independent-set-Rayleigh if and only if every basis-Rayleigh binary matroid is also independent-set-Rayleigh.