Strong nonnegativity and sums of squares on real varieties

Motivated by scheme theory, we introduce strong nonnegativity on real varieties, which has the property that a sum of squares is strongly nonnegative. We show that this algebraic property is equivalent to nonnegativity for nonsingular real varieties. Moreover, for singular varieties, we reprove and generalize obstructions of Gouveia and Netzer to the convergence of the theta body hierarchy of convex bodies approximating the convex hull of a real variety.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

On Permutation Binomials over Finite Fields

Let $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ be the finite field of characteristic $p$ containing $q = p^{r}$ elements and $f(x)=ax^{n} + x^{m}$ a binomial with coefficients in this field. If some conditions on the gcd of $n-m$ an $q-1$ are satisfied then this polynomial does not permute the elements of the field. We prove in particular that if $f(x) = ax^{n} + x^{m}$ permutes $\mathbb{F}_{p}$, where $n>m>0$ and $a \in {\mathbb{F}_{p}}^{*}$, then $p -1 \leq (d -1)d$, where $d = {{gcd}}(n-m,p-1)$, and that this bound of $p$ in term of $d$ only, is sharp. We show as well how to obtain in certain cases a permutation binomial over a subfield of $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ from a permutation binomial over $\mathbb{F}_{q}$