The SOS Rank of Biquadratic Forms
Number Theory
2025-12-01 v4
Abstract
In 1973, Calder\'{o}n proved that an positive semidefinite (psd) biquadratic form can always be expressed as the sum of squares of quadratic forms. Very recently, by applying Hilbert's theorem on ternary quartics, we proved that a psd biquadratic form can always be expressed as the sum of three squares of bilinear forms. This improved Calder\'{o}n's result for , and left the sos (sum-of-squares) rank problem of biquadratic forms for to further exploration. In this paper, we show that an psd biquadratic form can always be expressed as four squares of bilinear forms. We make a conjecture that an psd biquadratic form can always be expressed as squares of bilinear forms.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.16399,
title = {The SOS Rank of Biquadratic Forms},
author = {Liqun Qi and Chunfeng Cui and Yi Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.16399},
year = {2025}
}