Generic Power Sum Decompositions and Bounds for the Waring Rank

A notion of open rank, related with generic power sum decompositions of forms, has recently been introduced in the literature. The main result here is that the maximum open rank for plane quartics is eight. In particular, this gives the first example of n, d, such that the maximum open rank for degree d forms that essentially depend on n variables is strictly greater than the maximum rank. On one hand, the result allows to improve the previously known bounds on open rank, but on the other hand indicates that such bounds are likely quite relaxed. Nevertheless, some of the preparatory results are of independent interest, and still may provide useful information in connection with the problem of finding the maximum rank for the set of all forms of given degree and number of variables. For instance, we get that every ternary form of degree d>=3 can be annihilated by the product of d-1 pairwise independent linear forms.