On the complexity of smooth projective toric varieties (Q1281708)

Hoşten investigates a question of Batyrev about the maximal number of primitive collections in a complete regular fan with given codimension \(n-d\). A primitive collection is a minimal subset of the set \(A\) of one-dimensional generators that does not form a cone of the fan. The idea is to combine the following ingredients: (i) A fan may be considered as a certain triangulation of \(A\), and \textit{L. J. Billera, I. M. Gelfand} and \textit{B. Sturmfels} [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 57, No. 2, 258-268 (1993; Zbl 0727.05018)] have shown that each coherent triangulation of \(A\) corresponds to a chamber in the equally named complex \(\Gamma(B)\) built from the Gale transform \(B\) of \(A\). (ii) Adjacent chambers correspond to triangulations differing by a bistellar flip. (iii) There is an injection from the set of circuits of a fan (i.e.\ data that give rise to a bistellar flip) into the set of primitive collections. In particular, Hoşten obtains the number of facets of a chamber in \(\Gamma(B)\) as a lower bound of the number of primitive collections in the corresponding triangulation of \(A\). He uses this result to present a special fan (arising from the complete bipartite graph \(K_{2k-1,2k+1}\)) in dimension \(d=4k(k-1)\) with \(n=(2k-1)(2k+1)\) one-dimensional generators and \(4^k\) primitive collections. In particular, this establishes an example of a fan with codimension \(n-d\) with more than \(2^{(n-d)/2}\) primitive collections. Finally, Hoşten remarks that the result may be reformulated in terms of degenerations to monomial ideals. His fan gives rise to a toric ideal such that the reduced Gröbner basis with respect to the degree lexicographic term order has at least \(2^{(n-d)/2}\) elements.