It is clear that the permanent of an $n\times n$ matrix which entries are odd integers, is an even number, as it is the sum of $n!$ odd numbers. I am interested in finding the highest power of $2$ that divides the permanent of such a matrix.
Note that if $A$ is an odd $n\times n$ matrix, then $\det (A)\equiv 0 (\mod 2^{n-1})$. This can be seen by performing $n-1$ row operations to obtain an $n\times n$ matrix $B$ which $n-1$ of its rows consist of even integers (I found this nice observation in Amos Nevo Peter Sarnak's paper, "Prime and Almost Prime Points on Principal Homogeneous Spaces": http://web.math.princeton.edu/sarnak/NS-final-Oct-08.pdf).
I aim to find a similar result for the permanent. Of course, here I cannot use row operations. Running several thousands of examples on a computer, I suspect the following:
If $n=2^s -1$ for some integer $s\geq 2$ then $\text {perm}(A)\equiv 2^{n-s} (\mod 2^{n-s+1})$. If $2^s \leq n < 2^{s+1} -1$ then $\text {perm}(A)\equiv 0 (\mod 2^{n-s})$.
I have been able to show this (by tedious case analysis) for $n=3,4,5$. Namely, I already have that: $\text {perm}(A_{3\times 3})\equiv 2(\mod 4)$, $\text {perm}(A_{4\times 4})\equiv 0(\mod 4)$, $\text {perm}(A_{5\times 5})\equiv 0(\mod 8)$.
Any idea how to generalize this for any $n$, or if something like this has been done before?