On the freeness of hypersurface arrangements consisting of hyperplanes and spheres (Q1644884)

In the paper under review, the authors study the freeness of a certain class of hypersurface arrangements. Let us recall that a hypersurface arrangement \(\mathcal{A}\) in a smooth variety \(V\) is a reduced divisor \(D\) consisting of a union of smooth hypersurfaces such that at each point \(D\) is locally analytically isomorphic to a hyperplane arrangement. In the context of hypersurface arrangements, we have only a few papers devoted to the freeness of them, probably one of the first in this subject is due to Schenck and Tohaneanu in the case of conic-line arrangements in the complex projective plane. Before, we present the main results of this paper, we need to recall some basic objects. Let \(V\) be a \(k\)-dimensional vector space over \(\mathbb{K}\) with a coordinate system \(\{x_{1},\dots,x_{k}\} \subset V^{*}\). Let \(S = S(V^{*})\) be the symmetric algebra of \(V^{*}\), and we denote by \(\text{Der}_{\mathbb{K}}(S)\) the module of derivations. For a hypersurface arrangement \(\mathcal{A}\) in \(V\), the derivation module \(D(\mathcal{A})\) is defined by \[ D(\mathcal{A}) = \{\theta \in \text{Der}_{\mathbb{K}}(S) : \theta(\alpha_{X}) \in \alpha_{X} S \text{ for all } X \in \mathcal{A}\}, \] where \(X = \ker(\alpha_{X})\). We say that \(\mathcal{A}\) is free if \(D(\mathcal{A})\) is free. If \(\mathcal{A}\) is a free hypersurface arrangement and \(\{\theta_{1},\dots,\theta_{k}\}\) is a basis of \(D(\mathcal{A})\), then \(\exp(\mathcal{A}) = \{ \deg \theta_{1},\dots,\deg \theta_{k}\}\) is called the set of exponents of \(D(\mathcal{A})\). Theorem 1. Let \(\mathcal{A}_{n}\) be the hypersurface arrangement consisting of \(n\) spheres \(S_{1},\dots, S_{n}\), where \[ S_{i} = \{(x_{1},\dots,x_{k}) : \sum_{i=1}^{k} (x_{i} - a_{i})^{2} = r_{i}, (a_{1},a_{2},\dots,a_{k}) \in \mathbb{R}^{k}, r_{i} \in \mathbb{R}_{>0}\}. \] We define derivations \(\phi_{1}^{n},\dots,\phi_{k}^{n}\) by \[ M(\phi_{1}^{n},\dots,\phi_{k}^{n})=A_{n}A_{n-1} \cdots A_{1}, \] where \(A_{i}\) is an \(k\times k\) matrix with the \((p,q)\)-entry of \(A_{i}\) which is equal to either \((x_{p}-a_{p})(x_{q} - a_{q})\) if \(p\neq q\) or \((x_{p}-a_{p})^{2} - r_{i}\) otherwise. Then \(\phi^{n}_{1},\dots,\phi^{n}_{k}\) form a basis of \(D(\mathcal{A}_{n})\) and \(\exp (\mathcal{A}_{n}) = \{2n,\dots,2n\}\), where \(2n\) appears \(k\)-times. Theorem 2. Assume that \(\mathcal{A}\) is a free hyperplane arrangement with a homogeneous basis \(\theta_{1},\dots,\theta_{k}\) and \(\exp(\mathcal{A}) = \{d_{1},\dots,d_{k}\}\). Consider \[ S_{i}^{0} = \{(x_{1},\dots,x_{k}) : \sum_{i=1}^{k} x_{i}^{2} = r_{i} \in \mathbb{R}_{>0}\}. \] Define \(\mathcal{M}_{n} = \mathcal{A} \cup \{S_{1}^{0},\dots, S_{n}^{0}\}\) and derivations \(\phi_{1}^{n},\dots,\phi_{k}^{n}\) by \[ M(\phi_{1}^{n},\dots,\phi_{k}^{n}) = A_{n}A_{n-1} \cdots A_{1}\cdot M(\theta_{1},\dots,\theta_{k}), \] where \(A_{i}\) is a \(k\times k\) matrix with the \((p,q)\)-entry of \(A_{i}\) which is equal to either \(x_{p}x_{q}\) if \(p\neq q\) or \(x_{p}^{2} - r_{i}\) otherwise, and \(M(\theta_{1},\dots,\theta_{k}) := [\theta_{i}(x_{j})]_{k\times k}\). Then \(\phi_{1}^{n},\dots,\phi_{k}^{n}\) form a basis of \(D(\mathcal{M}_{n})\) with \(\exp(\mathcal{M}_{n}) = \{d_{1} + 2n,\dots,d_{k} + 2n\}\). Corollary. In the setting of Theorem 2, \(\mathcal{M}_{n}\) is free iff \(\mathcal{A}\) is free.