Using Macaulays correspondence we study the family of Artinian Gorenstein local algebras with fixed symmetric Hilbert function decomposition. As an application we give a new lower bound for cactus varieties of the third Veronese embedding. We discuss
the case of cubic surfaces, where interesting phenomena occur.
We introduce various notions of rank for a symmetric tensor, namely: rank, border rank, catalecticant rank, generalized rank, scheme length, border scheme length, extension rank and smoothable rank. We analyze the stratification induced by these rank
s. The mutual relations between these stratifications, allow us to describe the hierarchy among all the ranks. We show that strict inequalities are possible between rank, border rank, extension rank and catalecticant rank. Moreover we show that scheme length, generalized rank and extension rank coincide.
The tensor decomposition addressed in this paper may be seen as a generalisation of Singular Value Decomposition of matrices. We consider general multilinear and multihomogeneous tensors. We show how to reduce the problem to a truncated moment matrix
problem and give a new criterion for flat extension of Quasi-Hankel matrices. We connect this criterion to the commutation characterisation of border bases. A new algorithm is described. It applies for general multihomogeneous tensors, extending the approach of J.J. Sylvester to binary forms. An example illustrates the algebraic operations involved in this approach and how the decomposition can be recovered from eigenvector computation.
