Catalecticant intersections and confinement of decompositions of forms

Abstract

We introduce the notion of confinement of decompositions for forms or vector of forms. The confinement, when it holds, lowers the number of parameters that one needs to consider, in order to find all the possible decompositions of a given set of data. With the technique of confinement, we obtain here two results. First, we give a new, shorter proof of a result by London (\cite{London90}) that $3$ general plane cubics have $2$ simultaneous Waring decompositions of rank $6$. Then we compute, with the software Bertini, that $4$ general plane quartics have $18$ different decompositions of rank $10$ (a result which was not known before).

to appear on the special issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation on the occasion of MEGA 2019