English

Spectrahedral shadows

Optimization and Control 2017-12-05 v3 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

We show that there are many (compact) convex semi-algebraic sets in euclidean space that do not have a semidefinite representation. This gives a negative answer to a question by Nemirovski, resp. it shows that the Helton-Nie conjecture is false.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.07048,
  title  = {Spectrahedral shadows},
  author = {Claus Scheiderer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.07048},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

ver. 3: changed title, and changed terminology throughout the paper, using "spectrahedral shadows" instead of "sdp representable sets". To appear in SIAGA

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:30:34.841Z