Extremizers in Soprunov and Zvavitch's Bezout inequalities for mixed volumes (Q6063008)

Motivated by the classical Bezout inequality, \textit{I. Soprunov} and \textit{A. Zvavitch} [Int. Math. Res. Not. 2016, No. 23, 7230--7252 (2016; Zbl 1404.52008)] studied the inequality \[ V(K_1,\dots,K_r,D[n-r])V(D[n])^{r-1}\le\prod_{r=1}^rV(K_i,D[n-1]) \] in \({\mathbb R}^n\) for \(r\in\{2,\dots,n\}\) and convex bodies \(K_1,\dots,K_r,D\), where \(V\) denotes the mixed volume and \(D[k]\) indicates that the argument \(D\) appears \(k\) times. Let \(M_r\) denote the set of all \(n\)-dimensional convex bodies \(D\) for which the inequality holds for all convex bodies \(K_1,\dots,K_r\). Soprunov and Zvavitch proved that \(D\in M_r\) if \(D\) is a simplex and conjectured that \(D\notin M_r\) if \(D\) is not simplex. This is known to be true if \(n\le 3\) or if \(D\) is a polytope. The present paper collects some excluding properties (that is, properties of a convex body \(D\) that imply \(D\notin M_r\)), repeats some known ones, partly simplifying their proofs, explains related results, and obtains the following main result, where \(r=2\). If \(D\in M_2\), then \(S_D(\Omega_{n-2})=0\), where \(S_D\) is the surface area measure of \(D\) and \(\Omega_{n-2}\) denotes the set of all unit vectors \(u\) for which the support set of \(D\) with outer normal vector \(u\) has dimension \(n-2\).