Completions of fans (Q657007)

The paper under review is devoted to exhibiting a simplified construction of a rational simplicial completion for any rational simplicial semifan in a finite-dimensional real vector space equipped with a rational structure. Unlike Sumihiro's proof of his famous Equivariant Compactification Theorem, the proof in the paper relies on the ideas of Ewald and Ishida and is constructive by means of polyhedral geometry. The paper consists of 5 sections. In Sect. 1 the author fixes some notation and also reminds basic facts about rational structures \(W\) on \(\mathbb R\)-vector spaces \(V\). In order to make use of techniques from polyhedral geometry, all the necessary terminology and some basic topological and combinatorial properties of polycones are introduced. Then (Theorem 1.13) it is proved that every \(W\)-polycone has a \(W\)-decomposition, and a \(W\)-polycone has a unque \(W\)-decomposition if and only if it is sharp or a line. This is related to proving the well-known fact that every fan has a simplicial strict subdivision (1.16). In Sect. 2 for a \(W\)-semifan \(\Sigma\) a combinatorial description of its support frontier \(|\Sigma|\) is given. Namely, let \(\Sigma_{\max}\) to be the set of maximal elements of \(\Sigma\) and \(\Sigma_k=\{\sigma\in\Sigma|\;\dim(\sigma)=k\}\). Consider \(D(\Sigma)=\Sigma_{\max}-\Sigma_n\) and \(F(\Sigma)\) to be the subset of \(\Sigma_{n-1}\) s.t. for each element \(\sigma\) there exists one and only one element \(\tau\in\Sigma_n\) with \(\sigma\leq\tau\). Then (Theorem 2.8): \(\mathrm{fr}(|\Sigma|)=(\cup D(\Sigma))\cup(\cup F(\Sigma))\). In Sect. 3 for a \(W\)-fan \(\Sigma\) three notions concerning the properties of its \(W\)-extension \(\Sigma'\) are introduced, namely, relative simpliciality, separability and tight separability. To introduce the main notion of strong \(W\)-completion, construction of which is the aim of the paper, \(W\)-(quasi)packings of \(\Sigma\) as special types of extensions are defined, based on the three geometrical types of extensions above (3.6). In Sect. 4 (subsections A,B,C) more techniques based on the previous considerations is introduced to construct a complete semifan from a given fan \(\Sigma\) (in general, not a completion of \(\Sigma\) yet). A strong \(W\)-completion of \(\Sigma\) is a pair of its \(W\)-extensions, consisting of its \(W\)-packing and a \(W\)-completion of the latter one that is relatively simplicial over \(\Sigma\). To construct a packing of \(\Sigma\) each of its 1-dimensional cones is ``packed'' recursively by induction on the dimension of \(V\). In Sect. 5 the main result of the paper (Theorem 5.3) is proved: every \(W\)-fan has a strong \(W\)-completion. The crucial observation for this is Lemma 5.2, which is based on the results of Sect. 3,4: if \(\Sigma\) is a \(W\)-fan with \(\Sigma_1\neq\varnothing\) and has a \(W\)-packing then it has a strong \(W\)-completion. As a corollary of the main theorem (5.3) one gets Corollary 5.4: every simplicial \(W\)-semifan has a simplicial \(W\)-completion.