Higher dimensional lemniscates: the geometry of r particles in n-space with logarithmic potentials

DOI10.2422/2036-2145.201508_001MaRDI QIDQ4604580zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Ingrid Bauer, Fabrizio Catanese, Antonio J. Di Scala

Publication date 2 March 2018

Published in ANNALI SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE - CLASSE DI SCIENZE (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01919

zbMATH Keywords

lemniscatelogarithmic potentialMorse functiontopology of real algebraic varieties

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Topology of real algebraic varieties (14P25) Topological aspects of complex singularities: Lefschetz theorems, topological classification, invariants (32S50) Plurisubharmonic functions and generalizations (32U05) Low-dimensional dynamical systems (37Exx) Metric geometry (51F99) Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects) (68U05) Dynamics of a system of particles, including celestial mechanics (70F99)

Abstract: We prove some basic theorems concerning lemniscate configurations in an Euclidean space of dimension $ngeq3$. Lemniscates are defined as follows. Given m points $w_j$ in $mathbb{R}^n$, consider the function $F(x)$ which is the product of the distances $|x-w_j|$: the singular level sets of the function $F$ are called lemniscates. We show via complex analysis that the critical points of $F$ have Hessian of positivity at least $(n-1)$. This implies that, if $F$ is a Morse function, then $F$ has only local minima and saddle points with negativity 1. The critical points lie in the convex span of the points $|w_j|$ (these are absolute minima): but we made also the discovery that $F$ can also have other local minima, and indeed arbitrarily many. We discuss several explicit examples. We finally prove in the appendix that all critical points are isolated.

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