Shadow Systems, Decomposability and Isotropic Constants

Abstract We study necessary conditions for local maximizers of the isotropic constant that are related to notions of decomposability. Our main result asserts that the polar body of a local maximizer of the isotropic constant can only have few Minkowski summands; more precisely, its dimension of decomposability is at most $$\frac{1}{2}(n^2+3n)$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mfrac> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mfrac> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>(</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>3</mml:mn> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . Using a similar proof strategy, a result by Campi, Colesanti and Gronchi concerning RS-decomposability is extended to a larger class of shadow systems. We discuss the polytopal case, which turns out to have connections to (affine) rigidity theory, and investigate how the bound on the maximal number of irredundant summands can be improved if we restrict our attention to convex bodies with certain symmetries.