The spherical convex floating body (Q305743)

Given a convex body \(K\) in the \(d\)-dimensional Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^d\), and \(\delta>0\), the intersection of all halfspaces cutting off parts of \(K\) with volume \(\delta\) forms the \textit{convex floating body} \(K_{[\delta]}\) of \(K\). The \textit{affine surface area} of \(K\) appears as the limit of the volume difference of \(K\) and \(K_{[\delta]}\) when \(\delta\) goes to zero, and this fact allows the extension of the Blaschke's classical concept of affine surface area in dimension 2 and 3 to all dimensions. The affine surface area is an upper continous operator over the space of convex bodies and is invariant under volume preserving affine transformation. It has applications on different topics, for instance, in extremal problems, approximation of convex bodies by polytopes, concentration of volumes, and information theory. Let \(\mathbb{S}^d\) (\(d\geq 2\)) be the Euclidean unit sphere in \(\mathbb{R}^{d+1}\). The authors work in the space of convex bodies of \(\mathbb{S}^d\), called \textit{(spherical) convex bodies}, and define the concept of \textit{(spherical) convex floating body}. The asymptotic behavior of the volume difference of (spherical) convex body and its (spherical) convex floating body is proved, and this drives to introduce the \textit{floating area}, which has a lot of similarities to the Euclidean affine surface area. They show that the floating area is an upper semicontinuous valuation and has a duality formula which involves the polar body. It seems that the floating area could play an important role in spherical convex geometry.