Border rank of powers of ternary quadratic forms (Q6052924)

The paper deals with the problem of determining the rank of powers of quadrics, namely, given a non-degenerate \(n\)-ary quadric, which can always be written as \(q_n = x_1^2+ \ldots + x_n^2\), one wants to know the (Waring) rank of \(q_n^s\), i.e. the minimum number \(r = rk(q_n^s)\) of linear forms such that we have \(q_n^s = l_1^{2d} + \ldots + l_r^{2d}\). When considering the space \({\mathbb P}^N\) parameterizing \(n-ary\) forms of degree \(2s\), this means that we can find \(r\) distinct points \(P_1,\ldots,P_r\) on \(V_{n,2s}\), the \(2s\)-Veronese embedding of \({\mathbb P}^{n-1}\), such that the point \(T=[q_n^s]\), which parameterizes \(q_n^s\), is such that \(T \in <P_1,\ldots,P_r>\). A different notion of rank is the one of \textit{border rank}: a form \(f\in S^{2s}\mathbb C^n\), parameterized by a point \(T\in {\mathbb P}^N\) has border rank \(brk(f) = r\) if there is 0-dimensional subscheme \(X \subset V_{n,2s}\) of length \(r\) such that \(T \in <X>\). So, of course, we have \(brk(f) \leq rk(f)\). The main result in the paper is the computation of \(brk(g^s)\) for every power of a ternary quadric \(g \in S^{2s}\mathbb C^3\); namely, one gets \[ brk(g^s) = rk(g^s) =\binom{s+rh(g) -1}{s-1}, \] if \(g\) is degenerate, while, if \(g\) is non-degenerate, \[ brk(g^s) =\binom{s+2}{2}. \] The main tools for this results are the determination of the apolar ideal of \(q_n^s\) (which is of interest \textit{per se}), that turns out to be the space of harmonic polynomials, and border apolarity, a result by W. Buczynska and J. Buczynsky, which allows to work on border rank in a similar way as the classical apolarity is used for the rank.