Symmetric multilinear forms on Hilbert spaces: where do they attain their norm?

Abstract: We characterize the sets of norm one vectors $\mathbf{x}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{x}_k$ in a Hilbert space $\mathcal H$ such that there exists a $k$-linear symmetric form attaining its norm at $(\textbf{x}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{x}_k)$. We prove that in the bilinear case, any two vectors satisfy this property. However, for $k\ge 3$ only collinear vectors satisfy this property in the complex case, while in the real case this is equivalent to $\mathbf{x}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{x}_k$ spanning a subspace of dimension at most 2. We use these results to obtain some applications to symmetric multilinear forms, symmetric tensor products and the exposed points of the unit ball of $\mathcal L_s(^k\mathcal{H})$.