Spectrahedral cones generated by rank \(1\) matrices (Q5964246)

Let \(S^n_+\subset S^n\) be the cone of positive semi-definite matrices as a subset of the vector space of real symmetric \(n\times n\) matrices. The intersection of \(S^n_+\) with a linear subspace of \(S^n\) is called a spectrahedral cone. The author considers spectrahedral cones \(K\) such that every element of \(K\) can be represented as a sum of rank \(1\) matrices in \(K\). He calls such spectrahedral cones rank one generated (ROG). It is shown that ROG cones which are linearly isomorphic as convex cones are also isomorphic as linear sections of the positive semi-definite matrix cone, which is not the case for general spectrahedral cones. He gives many examples of ROG cones and shows how to construct new ROG cones from given ones by different procedures. The author also provides classifications of some subclasses of ROG cones, in particular, he classifies all ROG cones for matrix sizes not exceeding \(4\). Further, he proves some results on the structure of ROG cones. Also, he briefly considers the case of complex or quaternionic matrices.