Hyperbolic secant varieties of \(M\)-curves (Q2671932)

In the article under review, the authors relate the geometry of \(M\)-curves to the notion of real hyperbolic algebraic varieties. In more precise terms, a hyperbolic variety has the defining property that it admits a real fibred morphism to a real projective space of the same dimension. On the other hand, an \(M\)-curve, is a nonsingular irreducible real algebraic genus \(g\) curve which is such that \(X(\mathbb{R})\) has \(g+1\) connected components. The authors' main interest are hyperbolicity questions that surround \(M\)-curves and those real hypersurfaces, in real projective space \(\mathbb{P}^n\), that are ruled by an algebraic family of linear subspaces. The authors obtain a number of results. As one example, for the case of hypersurfaces that are ruled by a one-dimensional family of linear subspaces, the authors characterize, in terms of the ruling, when such hypersurfaces are hyperbolic. As an application of this result, the authors give a necessary and sufficient condition for the closed convex hull of a one-dimensional semi-algebraic set in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) to be a spectrahedron. As another result, the authors give a characterization for the \(k\)-th secant variety of an irreducible nondegenerate real curve in \(\mathbb{P}^n\) to be hyperbolic. A consequence of this result is that if \(X \subset \mathbb{P}^n\) is an \(M\)-curve that is embedded via the complete linear system of a maximally odd divisor and \(n \geq 2k+1\), then the secant variety \(\sigma_k(X)\) is hyperbolic. Finally, the authors give a detailed study of the secant varieties of real elliptic normal curves. In this direction, the authors' main result is that for each elliptic normal degree \(2k+3\) \(M\)-curve \(C \subset \mathbb{P}^{2k+2}\), there exists a definite determinantal representation for the vanishing ideal of the hyperbolic hypersurface \(\sigma_k(C)\).