Extreme points of Gram spectrahedra of binary forms

Abstract

The Gram spectrahedron $\text{Gram}(f)$ of a form $f$ with real coefficients parametrizes the sum of squares decompositions of $f$, modulo orthogonal equivalence. For $f$ a sufficiently general positive binary form of arbitrary degree, we show that $\text{Gram}(f)$ has extreme points of all ranks in the Pataki range. This is the first example of a family of spectrahedra of arbitrarily large dimensions with this property. We also calculate the dimension of the set of rank $r$ extreme points, for any $r$. Moreover, we determine the pairs of rank two extreme points for which the connecting line segment is an edge of $\text{Gram}(f)$.

The proof of Proposition 4.2 in v1, more specifically the argument in 4.8, was incorrect. It got replaced by a different proof in v3