Symmetry Adapted Gram Spectrahedra

Abstract

This paper explores the geometric structure of the spectrahedral cone, called the symmetry adapted PSD cone, and the symmetry adapted Gram spectrahedron of a symmetric polynomial. In particular, we determine the dimension of the symmetry adapted PSD cone, describe its extreme rays, and discuss the structure of its matrix representations. We also consider the symmetry adapted Gram spectrahedra for specific families of symmetric polynomials including binary symmetric polynomials, quadratics, and ternary quartics and sextics which give us further insight into these symmetric SOS polynomials. Finally, we discuss applications of the theory of sums of squares and symmetric polynomials which arise from symmetric function inequalities.