Toric geometry and the Semple-Nash modification (Q742202)

The paper under review consists of two parts. In the first part, the authors review some basic material about affine toric varieties and then they study more general ones. Their main concern are those toric varieties, not necessarily normal, that can be covered by a finite number of affine open sets, each one invariant under the action of the torus. For these, they provide a combinatorial description, in terms of fans where to each of their cones a finitely generated semigroup is attached, subject to suitable gluing conditions. Henceforth, ``toric variety'' will mean one in this sense. They discuss a number of properties of these varieties and other related concepts, such as invertible sheaves, ampleness, projectivity and blowing-ups with equivariant sheaves of ideals as centers. The blown-up variety is again toric. They emphasize the mentioned combinatorial description in their study. In the second part they study in detail certain blowing-ups, namely those whose center is the \textit{logarithmic Jacobian ideal} of the toric variety \(X\). The resulting variety is again toric, and if the base field has characteristic zero, this process agrees with the Semple-Nash modification of \(X\), where each point is replaced by the limit positions of tangent spaces at nearby regular points. This is more commonly called the Nash modification (or blow-up) of \(X\), but it seems that this process appeared for the first time in [\textit{J. G. Semple}, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 4, 24--49 (1954; Zbl 0055.14505)]. They prove that, starting from a toric variety \(X\) and a monomial valuation \(V\) of maximal rank of its function field, dominating a point \(x\) of \(X\), successive blowing-ups centered at log Jacobian ideals uniformize the valuation. That is, we reach the situation of a toric variety \(X'\) and a regular point \(x' \in X'\), lying over \(x\), such that the valuation dominates \(x'\). The proof is complicated, and throughout they use the combinatorial description of the first part. In particular, in characteristic zero the uniformization is obtained by repeated application of the Semple-Nash modification. In the final sections of the article they re-interpret their uniformization result in terms of the Zariski-Riemann space of the fan associated to the toric variety \(X\), which involves the preorders of an underlying lattice, introduced in [\textit{G. Ewald} and \textit{M.-N. Ishida}, Tohoku Math. J. (2) 58, No. 2, 189--218 (2006; Zbl 1108.14039)]. In general the authors work over an arbitrary base field, and some results are still valid over more general rings.