English

Quartic Spectrahedra

Optimization and Control 2014-11-10 v2 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

Quartic spectrahedra in 3-space form a semialgebraic set of dimension 24. This set is stratified by the location of its ten nodes. There are twenty maximal strata, identified recently by Degtyarev and Itenberg, via the global Torelli Theorem for real K3 surfaces. We here give a new proof that is self-contained and algorithmic. This involves extending Cayley's characterization of quartic symmetroids, by the property that the branch locus of the projection from a node consists of two cubic curves. This paper represents a first step towards the classification of all spectrahedra of a given degree and dimension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.3675,
  title  = {Quartic Spectrahedra},
  author = {John Christian Ottem and Kristian Ranestad and Bernd Sturmfels and Cynthia Vinzant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.3675},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

28 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:07:53.937Z