Decomposition of powers of quadrics

The study of the decompositions of the powers of a quadratic form, also called representations, is a very classical problem. Many examples appear several times even in old literature, especially for the real case. Our purpose is to deal with this problem by a modern point of view, with the final aim of determining its rank and its border rank. The main instrument we used is the apolarity theory, by which it is possible to determine suitable decompositions of a given form, just analyzing its apolar ideal, that in the case of the powers of quadrics results to be generated by harmonic polynomials. This approach also allows us to determine the border rank in the case of three variables.