On the Kronecker Products of Symmetric Persistent Tensors

Abstract

Persistent tensors form a recursively defined class adapted to the substitution method and provide nontrivial lower bounds on tensor rank. We study the behavior of symmetric persistent tensors under Kronecker products. We establish a global differentiation identity expressing the Hessian matrix of a Kronecker product of homogeneous polynomials in terms of the Hessian matrices of its factors; although no corresponding determinant identity holds globally, the Hessian polynomials factor exactly at decomposable points. This yields a multiplicative formula for the distinguished Hessian coefficients of isobaric forms and closure under Kronecker products for symmetric persistent tensors that are isobaric of the distinguished weight, including iterated products and powers. Combined with the classification in small dimensions, this implies closure when both factors have dimension at most three, and for persistent cubics when both have dimension at most four. We further give sufficient closure criteria via simultaneous strict triangularizability of normalized Hessian spaces, for cubics and then arbitrary degree, and show that the distinguished isobaric class satisfies this condition. Finally, we show that symmetric persistence is not preserved in general by constructing a persistent cubic $f\in\operatorname{Sym}^3\mathbb{C}^{12}$ such that $f\boxtimes f\in\operatorname{Sym}^3\mathbb{C}^{144}$ is not persistent. The obstruction occurs at a nondecomposable point, showing that the Hessian factorization on the Segre variety does not extend to the full tensor product space.