Some Cubic and Quartic Inequalities of Four Variables

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of positive semidefinite cones of certain polynomial spaces in four variables, focusing on extremal elements, discriminants, and semialgebraic decompositions for specific symmetric and cyclic polynomial classes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of extremal elements, discriminants, and decompositions of PSD cones for symmetric and cyclic quartic polynomials in four variables.

Findings

Characterization of extremal elements of the cones

Explicit descriptions of discriminants of the cones

Semialgebraic decompositions of the cones

Abstract

Let $\mathcal{H} \subset \mathcal{H}_{n,d} := \mathbb{R}[x_1$,$\ldots$, $x_n]_d$ be a vector space, and $A$ be a compact semialgebraic subset of $\mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{R}}^{n-1}$. We shall study some PSD cones $\mathcal{P} = \mathcal{P}(A$, $\mathcal{H}) := \big\{f \in \mathcal{H}$ $\big|$ $f(a) \geq 0$ ($\forall a \in A$)$\big\}$. Our interests are (1) to determine the extremal elements of $\mathcal{P}$, (2) to determine discriminants of $\mathcal{P}$, (3) to describe $\mathcal{P}$ as a union of basic semialgebraic subsets, and (4) to find a nice test set when $\dim \mathcal{H}$ is low. In this article, we present (1), (2), (3) and (4) for $\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{R}^4$, $\mathcal{H}_{4,4}^{s0})$ and $\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{R}_+^4$, $\mathcal{H}_{4,4}^{s0})$, where $\mathcal{H}_{n,d}^{s0} := \big\{f \in \mathcal{H}_{n,d}$ $\big|$ $f$ is symmetric and $f(1,\ldots,1)=0 \big\}$. We also provide (1) -- (4) for $\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{R}_+^4$, $\mathcal{H}_{4,3}^{c0})$, where $\mathcal{H}_{n,d}^{c0} := \big\{f \in \mathcal{H}_{n,d}$ $\big|$ $f$ is cyclic and $f(1,\ldots,1)=0 \big\}$.