Inequalities and tail bounds for elementary symmetric polynomial

This paper studies the elementary symmetric polynomials Sk(x) for x ∈ Rn. We show that if |Sk(x)|, |Sk+1(x)| are small for some k > 0 then |S`(x)| is also small for all ` > k. We use this to prove probability tail bounds for the symmetric polynomials when the inputs are only t-wise independent, which may be useful in the context of derandomization. We also provide examples of t-wise independent distributions for which our bounds are essentially tight.