Separating invariants for multisymmetric polynomials

Abstract

This article studies separating invariants for the ring of multisymmetric polynomials in $m$ sets of $n$ variables over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{K}$. We prove that in order to obtain separating sets it is enough to consider polynomials that depend only on $\lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor + 1$ sets of these variables. This improves a general result by Domokos about separating invariants. In addition, for $n \leq 4$ we explicitly give minimal separating sets (with respect to inclusion) for all $m$ in case $\text{char}(\mathbb{K}) = 0$ or $\text{char}(\mathbb{K}) > n$.