Polyhedral Divisors and Algebraic Torus Actions

We study the relation between projective T-varieties and their affine cones in the language of the so-called divisorial fans and polyhedral divisors. As an application, we present the Grassmannian Grass(2,n) as a ``fansy divisor'' on the moduli space of stable, n-pointed, rational curves.

We prove that for smooth projective toric varieties, the Okounkov body of a $T$-invariant pseudo-effective divisor with respect to a $T$-invariant flag decomposes as a finite Minkowski sum of indecomposable polytopes. We prove that these indecomposable polytopes form a Minkowski base and that they correspond to the rays in the secondary fan. Moreover, we present an algorithm to find the Minkowski base.

K. Altmann and J. Hausen have shown that affine T-varieties can be described in terms of p-divisors. Given a p-divisor describing a T-variety X, we show how to construct new p-divisors describing X with respect to actions by larger tori. Conversely, if dim T=dim X-1, we show how to construct new p-divisors describing X with respect to actions by closed subtori of T. As a first application, we give explicit constructions for the p-divisors describing certain Cox rings. Further...

These notes are based on a series of lectures given by the author at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. Addressed topics include affine and projective toric varieties, abstract normal toric varieties from fans, divisors on toric varieties and Cox's construction of a toric variety as a GIT quotient. We emphasize the role of toric varieties in solving systems of polynomial equations and provide many computational examples using the Julia packag...

Toric geometry provides a bridge between the theory of polytopes and algebraic geometry: one can associate to each lattice polytope a polarized toric variety. In this paper we explore this correspondence to classify smooth lattice polytopes having small degree, extending a classification provided by Dickenstein, Di Rocco and Piene. Our approach consists in interpreting the degree of a polytope as a geometric invariant of the corresponding polarized variety, and then applying ...

We provide a complete description of normal affine algebraic varieties over the real numbers endowed with an effective action of the real circle, that is, the real form of the complex multiplicative group whose real locus consists of the unitary circle in the real plane. Our approach builds on the geometrico-combinatorial description of normal affine varieties with effective actions of split tori in terms of proper polyhedral divisors on semiprojective varieties due to Altman...

Let X be a Mori dream space together with an effective torus action of complexity one. In this note, we construct a polyhedral divisor on a suitable covering of the projective line P^1 which corresponds to the affine spectrum of the Cox ring of X. This description allows for a detailed study of torus orbits and deformations of the latter. Moreover, we present coverings of P^1 together with an action of a finite abelian group A in terms of so-called A-divisors of degree zero o...

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.

The nef cone of a projective variety Y is an important and often elusive invariant. In this paper we construct two polyhedral lower bounds and one polyhedral upper bound for the nef cone of Y using an embedding of Y into a toric variety. The lower bounds generalize the combinatorial description of the nef cone of a Mori dream space, while the upper bound generalizes the F-conjecture for the nef cone of the moduli space \bar{M}_{0,n} to a wide class of varieties.

Tropicalization is a procedure that assigns polyhedral complexes to algebraic subvarieties of a torus. If one fixes a weighted polyhedral complex, one may study the set of all subvarieties of a toric variety that have that complex as their tropicalization. This gives a "tropical realization" moduli functor. We use rigid analytic geometry and the combinatorics of Chow complexes as studied by Alex Fink to prove that when the ambient toric variety is quasiprojective, the moduli ...