Irreducibility of toric complete intersections

We describe a class of affine toric varieties $V$ that are set-theoretically minimally defined by codim $V+1$ binomial equations over fields of any characteristic.

This article will appear in the proceedings of the AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry at Santa Cruz, July 1995. The topic is toric ideals, by which I mean the defining ideals of subvarieties of affine or projective space which are parametrized by monomials. Numerous open problems are given.

We present a class of toric varieties $V$ which, over any algebraically closed field of characteristic zero, are defined by codim $V$+1 binomial equations.

We present examples which show that in dimension higher than one or codimension higher than two, there exist toric ideals I_A such that no binomial ideal contained in I_A and of the same dimension is a complete intersection. This result has important implications in sparse elimination theory and in the study of the Horn system of partial differential equations.

We describe classes of toric varieties of codimension 2 which are either minimally defined by 3 binomial equations over any algebraically closed field, or are set-theoretic complete intersections in exactly one positive characteristic.

This article is based on a series of lectures on toric varieties given at RIMS, Kyoto. We start by introducing toric varieties, their basic properties and later pass to more advanced topics relating mostly to combinatorics.

Based on Nakajima's Classification Theorem we describe the precise form of the binomial equations which determine toric locally complete intersection ("l.c.i'') singularities.

Given a set $\mathcal A = \{a_1,\ldots,a_n\} \subset \mathbb{N}^m$ of nonzero vectors defining a simplicial toric ideal $I_{\mathcal A} \subset k[x_1,...,x_n]$, where $k$ is an arbitrary field, we provide an algorithm for checking whether $I_{\mathcal A}$ is a complete intersection. This algorithm does not require the explicit computation of a minimal set of generators of $I_{\mathcal A}$. The algorithm is based on the application of some new results concerning toric ideals t...

The K-rings of non-singular complex pro jective varieties as well as quasi- toric manifolds were described in terms of generators and relations in an earlier work of the author with V. Uma. In this paper we obtain a similar description for complete non-singular toric varieties. Indeed, our approach enables us to obtain such a description for the more general class of torus manifolds with locally standard torus action and orbit space a homology polytope.

These notes survey some basic results in toric varieties over a field with examples and applications. A computer algebra package (written by the second author) is described which deals with both affine and projective toric varieties in any number of dimensions (written in both the software packages MAGMA and GAP). Among other things, the package implements a desingularization procedure for affine toric varieties, constructs some error-correcting codes associated with toric ...