Implementing geometric complexity theory: on the separation of orbit closures via symmetries

Abstract

Understanding the difference between group orbits and their closures is a key difficulty in geometric complexity theory (GCT): While the GCT program is set up to separate certain orbit closures (i.e., prove non-containment of one orbit closure in the other), many beautiful mathematical properties are only known for the group orbits, in particular close relations with symmetry groups and invariant spaces, while the orbit closures seem much more difficult to understand. However, in order to prove lower bounds in algebraic complexity theory, considering group orbits is not enough. In this paper we tighten the relationship between the orbit of the power sum polynomial and its closure, so that we can separate this orbit closure from the orbit closure of the product of variables by just considering the symmetry groups of both polynomials and their representation theoretic decomposition coefficients. In a natural way our construction yields a multiplicity obstruction that is neither an occurrence obstruction, nor a so-called vanishing ideal occurrence obstruction. All multiplicity obstructions so far have been of one of these two types. Our paper is the first implementation of the ambitious approach that was originally suggested in the first papers on geometric complexity theory by Mulmuley and Sohoni (SIAM J Comput 2001, 2008): Before our paper, all existence proofs of obstructions only took into account the symmetry group of one of the two polynomials (or tensors) that were to be separated. In our paper the multiplicity obstruction is obtained by comparing the representation theoretic decomposition coefficients of both symmetry groups. Our proof uses a semi-explicit description of the coordinate ring of the orbit closure of the power sum polynomial in terms of Young tableaux, which enables its comparison to the coordinate ring of the orbit.