Toric degenerations of spherical varieties (Q1777341)

The authors prove that any affine, resp. polarized projective, spherical variety admits a flat degeneration to an affine, resp. polarized projective, toric variety. In fact, several degenerations, labeled by reduced decompositions of the longest element \(\omega_0\) in the Weyl group of \(G\), are constructed. A number of special cases of this result (in particular, degenerations of flag and Schubert varieties) has been proved before. Important ingredients of the present proof are the dual canonical basis and its string parametrizations, string cones and polytopes, Caldero's filtration [\textit{P.~Caldero}, Transform. Groups 7, 51--60 (2002; Zbl 1050.14040)]. Motivated by mirror symmetry, the authors give conditions for the limit toric variety to be a Gorenstein Fano, i.e., to correspond to reflexive polytopes. They provide an explanation for the limits as boundary points of the moduli space of stable pairs whose existence is predicted by the minimal model program. Many examples are studied.