Spectrahedral shadows and completely positive maps on real closed fields

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Contributors

Abstract

In this article we develop new methods for exhibiting convex semialgebraic sets that are not spectrahedral shadows. We characterize when the set of nonnegative polynomials with a given support is a spectrahedral shadow in terms of sums of squares. As an application we prove that the cone of copositive matrices of size n\geq5 is not a spectrahedral shadow, answering a question of Scheiderer. Our arguments are based on the model-theoretic observation that any formula defining a spectrahedral shadow must be preserved by every unital \mathbb{R} -linear completely positive map R\to R on a real closed field extension R of \mathbb{R} .

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2233–2259
JournalJournal of the European Mathematical Society : JEMS
Volume28
Issue number5
Publication statusPublished - 2026
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-7245-2861/work/208071154
Mendeley d06844ad-d428-31fb-9bbe-336f78a71259
unpaywall 10.4171/jems/1509

Keywords