| dc.description.abstract | Given a polytope P in $\mathbb{R}^n$, we say that P has a positive
semidefinite lift (psd lift) of size d if one can express P as the linear
projection of an affine slice of the positive semidefinite cone
$\mathbf{S}^d_+$. If a polytope P has symmetry, we can consider equivariant psd
lifts, i.e. those psd lifts that respect the symmetry of P. One of the simplest
families of polytopes with interesting symmetries are regular polygons in the
plane, which have played an important role in the study of linear programming
lifts (or extended formulations). In this paper we study equivariant psd lifts
of regular polygons. We first show that the standard Lasserre/sum-of-squares
hierarchy for the regular N-gon requires exactly ceil(N/4) iterations and thus
yields an equivariant psd lift of size linear in N. In contrast we show that
one can construct an equivariant psd lift of the regular 2^n-gon of size 2n-1,
which is exponentially smaller than the psd lift of the sum-of-squares
hierarchy. Our construction relies on finding a sparse sum-of-squares
certificate for the facet-defining inequalities of the regular 2^n-gon, i.e.,
one that only uses a small (logarithmic) number of monomials. Since any
equivariant LP lift of the regular 2^n-gon must have size 2^n, this gives the
first example of a polytope with an exponential gap between sizes of
equivariant LP lifts and equivariant psd lifts. Finally we prove that our
construction is essentially optimal by showing that any equivariant psd lift of
the regular N-gon must have size at least logarithmic in N. | |
