The concept of sums of nonnegative circuit polynomials (SONC) was recently introduced as a new certificate of nonnegativity especially for sparse polynomials. In this paper, we explore the relationship between nonnegative polynomials and SONC polynomials. As a first result, we provide sufficient conditions for nonnegative polynomials with general Newton polytopes to be SONC polynomials, which generalizes the previous result on nonnegative polynomials with simplex Newton polytopes. Secondly, we prove that every SONC polynomial admits a SONC decomposition without cancellation. In other words, SONC decompositions can exactly preserve the sparsity of nonnegative polynomials, which is dramatically different from the classical sum of squares (SOS) decompositions and is a key property to design efficient algorithms for sparse polynomial optimization based on SONC decompositions.

21 pages