Minimality of toric arrangements (Q2018243)

The theory of hyperplane arrangements is rich with a combinatorial base from matroid theory and established topological results on the complement space. In the paper under review, the authors make important contributions to the study of toric arrangements. The paper reviews results from hyperplane arrangements and provides results from toric arrangements, enhancing the readability of the paper. From the authors' introduction: ``Section 3 breaks the flow of material directly related to toric arrangements in order to develop discrete Morse theory for acyclic categories, generalizing the existing theory for posets. We approach the core of our work with Section 4, where we introduce a stratification and a related decomposition of the toric Salvetti complex. In order to understand the structure of the pieces of the decomposition of the toric Salvetti complex we need to patch together `local' combinatorial data, which come from the theory of arrangements of hyperplanes. We do this in Section 5 using diagrams of acyclic categories. Our work culminates with Section 6. The keystone is Proposition 6.8, where we prove the existence of perfect acyclic matchings for the face categories of subdivisions of the compact torus given by toric arrangements. With this , we can apply the Patchwork Lemma of discrete Morse theory (in its version for acyclic categories) to our decomposition of the toric Salvetti complex in order to get an acyclic matching of the whole complex. This matching can be shown to be perfect and thus prescribes a series of cellular collapses leading to a minimal model for the complement of the toric arrangement. As a further application of our methods, in Section 7 we show that our methods can be used to construct a minimal complex for the complement of (finite) complexified arrangements of hyperplanes.''