Families of pointed toric varieties and degenerations (Q2152868)

A toric degeneration of an algebraic variety \(X\) is a flat family \(\mathcal{F}\rightarrow \mathbb{A}^1\) whose fiber \(\mathcal{F}_t\) over all points \(t\in\mathbb{A}^1\setminus\{0\}\) are isomorphic to \(X^t\) and whose fiber \(\mathcal{F}_0\) over \(0\) is toric variety \(Y\). Studying degenerations is a standard approach in algebraic geometry. The reason is that many important algebraic invariants of \(X\) coincide with those of \(Y\), e.g. the Hilbert polynomial. In general toric varieties are easier to study than other types of varieties because there is a number of discrete geometric objects, such as polyhedral fans and polytopes associated to them. These objects can be studied with combinatorial methods. There are two questions which are central to using degenerations. The first one is: how to obtain a toric degeneration of a given variety. And the second is what are the relations between various degenerations of the same variety? The article under review focuses on the second of questions mentioned above through studying families of toric varieties and their moduli. The specific cases studied here are rather special and the whole article is rather technical. The approach taken is modelled on the construction of the Losev-Manin moduli space parametrizing chains of projective lines with marked points. Genearlizing the idea of twisted Cayley sum, the authors extend Losev-Manin construction to certain families of pointed toric varieties.