Generic identifiability of pairs of ternary forms

Polynomial rings and ideals; rings of integer-valued polynomials (13F20) Projective techniques in algebraic geometry (14N05) Secant varieties, tensor rank, varieties of sums of powers (14N07)

Abstract: We prove that two general ternary forms are simultaneously identifiable only in the classical cases of two quadratic and a cubic and a quadratic form. We translate the problem into the study of a certain linear system on a projective bundle on the plane, and we apply techniques from projective and birational geometry to prove that the associated map is not birational.

Review text

For a given degree \(d\) form, or equivalently, a homogeneous polynomial \(f\), a Waring decomposition of it is a decomposition of \(f\) as a sum of powers of linear forms. In a similar way, one can decompose a tensor as a sum of rank one tensors. The smallest possible number of such summands is called the \textit{Waring rank} of \(f\). Waring decompositions raise a huge interest in many different areas. One interesting problem is to understand when the decomposition is unique. In this case, we say that \(f\) is \textit{identifiable}. Identifiability is a desirable property with many applications, as it gives a canonical form for \(f\). When we work over the complex field, there is a dense open subset of the space of polynomials where all elements have the same rank, which is called the \textit{generic rank}, and also the same number of decompositions. Classically, the problem was to classify all pairs \((n, d)\) such that the general \(f \in \mathbb{C}[x_0,\dots, x_n]_d\) is identifiable. In this paper we focus on the version of the Waring problem concerning pairs of polynomials. It is a classical result that two general quadratic forms \(f , g \in \mathbb{C}[x_0,\dots, x_n]_2\) can be simultaneously diagonalized. In the paper, such decomposition is generalized to pairs of forms of any degrees (simultaneous decompositions). A pair is \(k\)-simultaneously identifiable, or simply \(k\)-identifiable if it admits a unique simultaneous decomposition with \(k\) summands. tensors. This paper focuses on identifiability; the guiding problem is the classification of all triples \((n, c, d)\) such that the general pair of forms of degrees \(c\) and \(d\) in \(n + 1\) variables is identifiable. The main result in the paper is the complete classification of the (rare) cases of such identifiability for ternary forms; namely (Theorem 2): let \(c\) and \(d\) be positive integers such that \(c \leq d\). The general pair of ternary forms of degrees \(c\) and \(d\) is identifiable if and only if \((c, d) \in \{(2, 2), (2, 3)\}\). The result uses the tight connection between decompositions and secant varieties, via translating the problem into a question about the degree of a certain rational map. Namely, the set of decompositions of a pair \((f, g)\) is the fiber of the secant map of the projective bundle \(X = \mathbb{P}(\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^2 }(c) \oplus\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{P}^2 }(d)) \). In order to disprove identifiability, it is shown that the map is not birational (except for the two known cases considered in the statement).

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