Decompositions and Terracini loci of cubic forms of low rank

Abstract

We study Waring rank decompositions for cubic forms of rank $n+2$ in $n+1$ variables. In this setting, we prove that if a concise form has more than one non-redundant decomposition of length $n+2$, then all such decompositions share at least $n-3$ elements, and the remaining elements lie in a special configuration. Following this result, we give a detailed description of the $(n+2)$-th Terracini locus of the third Veronese embedding of $n$-dimensional projective space.