Gorenstein toric Fano varieties (Q1772018)

Smooth toric Fano varieties, at least in low dimension, have been well studied. Recently some attention has been given to toric Fano varieties with canonical or terminal singularities. This paper adapts many of the tools used for the smooth case to Gorenstein varieties. Mostly the methods used here are combinatorial: reflexive polytopes, for instance, figure largely, but Mori theory is only touched on. The first section is introductory and the second gives some low-dimensional classification results, for instance for \(3\)-dimensional Gorenstein toric Fano varieties with terminal singularities. As the author remarks, there is a list of all terminal Fano toric \(3\)-folds, due to \textit{A. M. Kasprzyk} [Toric Fano 3-folds with terminal singularities, preprint, \texttt{http://arxiv.org/abs/math.AG/0311284}], from which the Gorenstein case may be extracted; but the direct proof sketched here is different. Section~3 uses projection of a reflexive polytope from a lattice point in its boundary to provide a method of reduction to lower-dimensional cases: it is used to give a combinatorial proof that if \(X\) is a smooth toric Fano variety and \(D\subset X\) is a torus-invariant divisor then \(-K_D\) is nef: this was shown by other means by Batyrev. Section~4 extends \textit{V. V. Batyrev}'s notion of primitive relation [J. Math. Sci., New York 94, 1021--1050 (1999; Zbl 0929.14024)] and uses it to restrict the possible combinatorial types that a reflexive polytope might have. In Section~5 are conjectures on the number of vertices a reflexive polytope might have, one of which is verified under an extra symmetry assumption. On the way it is shown that \(\rho(X)-\rho(D)\leq 3\) if \(X\) is a \({\mathbb Q}\)-factorial Gorenstein toric Fano variety and \(D\) is a torus-invariant divisor: this was shown by \textit{C. Casagrande} [Manuscr. Math. 111, No.4, 471--485 (2003; Zbl 1039.14024)] when \(X\) is smooth. Finally in Section~6 some sharp bounds are proved for the number of lattice points in a terminal Fano polytope or a centrally symmetric reflexive polytope.