On the dimensions of secant varieties of Segre-Veronese varieties (Q1944685)

The authors consider the Segre-Veronese embedding \(X\) of type \((a_1,\dots,a_m)\) of the product of projective spaces \(\mathbb P^{n_1}\times\dots\times\mathbb P^{n_m}\) (over the complex field). The ambient space of the embedding can be viewed as the space of complex tensors which are partially symmetric with respect to a partition of the set of indexes. Secant varieties of \(X\) correspond to the closure of the set of tensors with given (partially symmetric) rank. Their dimension has an expected value, computed by a parameter count. The authors introduce an inductive method for the study of the dimension of secant varieties of \(X\), which consists in the specialization of points to some fiber of the product. The specialization allows to extend results on some Segre-Veronese embedding to products with more factors. As an application, the authors determine the dimension of the secant varieties to the Segre-Veronese embedding of type \((a,b)\) of the product \(\mathbb P^n\times\mathbb P^1\), in the range \(b\geq 3\). They prove that the dimension is equal to the expected value, except when \(a=2\) and \(b\) is even.