In convex geometry, a spectrahedron is a shape that can be represented as a linear matrix inequality. Alternatively, the set of n × n positive semidefinite matrices forms a convex cone in Rn × n, and a spectrahedron is a shape that can be formed by intersecting this cone with a linear affine subspace.
Spectrahedra are the solution spaces of semidefinite programs.
An example of a spectrahedron is the similarly named spectahedron, defined as
where is the set of n × n positive semidefinite matrices and is the trace of the matrix . The spectahedron is a compact set, and can be thought of as the "semidefinite' analog of the simplex.