A partially structure-preserving algorithm for the permanents of adjacency matrices of fullerenes

A partially structure-preserving method for sparse symmetric matrices is proposed. Computational results on the permanents of adjacency matrices arising from molecular chemistry are presented. The largest adjacency matrix of fullerenes computed before is that of C₆₀ with a cost of several hours on supercomputers, while only about 6 min on an Intel Pentium PC (1.8 GHz) with our method. Further numerical computations are given for larger fullerenes and other adjacency matrices with n=60,80. This shows that our method is promising for problems from molecular chemistry.