Examples of Kähler-Einstein toric Fano manifolds associated to non-symmetric reflexive polytopes (Q717828)

\textit{V. V. Batyrev} and \textit{E. N. Selivanova}, having proved the converse, asked in [J. Reine Angew. Math. 512, 225--236 (1999; Zbl 0939.32016)] whether the reflexive polytope \(P\) associated with a smooth toric Fano variety \(X\) is necessarily symmetric if \(X\) has a Kähler-Einstein metric Although an expectation seems to have arisen that this would be true, it is not, as this paper shows. In fact there are three counterexamples, two in dimension~8 and one in dimension~7, in the list of Fano polytopes produced by Øbro. \textit{X.-J. Wang} and \textit{X. Zhu} proved in [Adv. Math. 188, No. 1, 87--103 (2004; Zbl 1086.53067)] that \(X\) admits a Kähler-Einstein metric if and only if the barycentre of \(P\) is the origin, so all that the authors have to do is compute the barycentres of the non-symmetric polytopes in Øbro's list. They also observe that in these cases the alpha-invariant of \textit{G. Tian} [Invent. Math. 89, 225--246 (1987; Zbl 0599.53046)] is equal to \({{1}\over{2}}\) (for any compact group of automorphisms of \(X\)) and Tian's results therefore do not predict the Kähler-Einstein metric. Finally, they observe that these examples also invalidate a suggested approach [\textit{K. Chan} and \textit{N. C. Leung}, Commun. Anal. Geom. 15, No. 2, 359--379 (2007; Zbl 1129.14054] to proving a conjectural Chern number inequality for toric Fano varieties.