Convex Hulls of Grassmannians and Combinatorics of Symmetric Hypermatrices

Abstract

It is known that the complex Grassmannian of $k$-dimensional subspaces can be identified with the set of projection matrices of rank $k$. It is also classically known that the convex hull of this set is the set of Hermitian matrices with eigenvalues between $0$ and $1$ and summing to $k$. We give a new proof of this fact. We also give an existence theorem for a certain combinatorial class of hypermatrices by a similar argument. This existence theorem can be rewritten into an existence theorem for a uniform weighted hypergraph with given weighted degree sequence.