Birational aspects of the geometry of Varieties of Sums of Powers

Varieties of Sums of Powers describe the additive decompositions of a homogeneous polynomial into powers of linear forms. The study of these varieties dates back to Sylvester and Hilbert, but only few of them, for special degrees and number of variables, are concretely identified. In this paper we aim to understand a general birational behavior of VSP. To do this we birationally embed these varieties into Grassmannians and prove the rational connectedness of many VSP in arbitrary degrees and number of variables. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.