Symmetric tensor decomposition on rational varieties

Abstract

We study the Waring decomposition of symmetric tensors with nodes on a rational variety. We provide an explicit characterisation of the existence of such a decomposition under some technical assumption, and introduce an efficient algorithm to decompose this novel class of structured symmetric tensors. The framework directly generalizes Hankel tensors (Qi 2015) to the multivariate setting. We analyse in details the case of toric varieties and rational curves. Proving the existence of a quadrature formula of even strength 2N with at most N + 1 nodes, that avoids a prescribed finite set of points, we establish new sharp upper bounds on the minimal number of nodes for quadrature formulae on rational curves. Numerical experimentation demonstrates the gain of this approach, compared to classical direct approaches.