Inverting catalecticants of ternary quartics

Abstract

We study the reciprocal variety to the linear space of symmetric matrices (LSSM) of catalecticant matrices associated with ternary quartics. With numerical tools, we obtain 85 to be its degree and 36 to be the ML-degree of the LSSM. We provide a geometric explanation to why equality between these two invariants is not reached, as opposed to the case of binary forms, by describing the intersection of the reciprocal variety and the orthogonal of the LSSM in the rank loci. Moreover, we prove that only the rank-$1$ locus, namely the Veronese surface $\nu_4(\mathbb{P}^2)$, contributes to the degree of the reciprocal variety.