English

Hyperbolicity cones and imaginary projections

Algebraic Geometry 2018-05-24 v5

Abstract

Recently, the authors and de Wolff introduced the imaginary projection of a polynomial fC[z]f\in\mathbb{C}[\mathbf{z}] as the projection of the variety of ff onto its imaginary part, I(f) = {Im(z):zV(f)}\mathcal{I}(f) \ = \ \{\text{Im}(\mathbf{z}) \, : \, \mathbf{z} \in \mathcal{V}(f) \}. Since a polynomial ff is stable if and only if I(f)R>0n = \mathcal{I}(f) \cap \mathbb{R}_{>0}^n \ = \ \emptyset, the notion offers a novel geometric view underlying stability questions of polynomials. In this article, we study the relation between the imaginary projections and hyperbolicity cones, where the latter ones are only defined for homogeneous polynomials. Building upon this, for homogeneous polynomials we provide a tight upper bound for the number of components in the complement I(f)c\mathcal{I}(f)^{c} and thus for the number of hyperbolicity cones of ff. And we show that for n2n \ge 2, a polynomial ff in nn variables can have an arbitrarily high number of strictly convex and bounded components in I(f)c\mathcal{I}(f)^{c}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.04988,
  title  = {Hyperbolicity cones and imaginary projections},
  author = {Thorsten Jörgens and Thorsten Theobald},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04988},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

final version; 13 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:45:54.470Z