Some examples of non-smoothable Gorenstein Fano toric threefolds (Q2182436)

This nicely-written paper constructs an example of a toric Fano variety in dimension 3 which has singularities of type \(cA_1\) (in particular, smoothable) but which is not globally smoothable. This provides a counterexample to a conjecture of Prokhorov predicting that any Fano variety of dimension 3 with only cdV singularities should be smoothable. The key technical point is the study of deformation theory of so-called \(A_n\)-bundles, roughly meaning bundles whose fibres are copies of the \(A_n\) surface singularity. In Section 2 of the paper the author shows how to compute the deformation space of such a bundle in terms of a certain vector bundle on the base. In Section 3, the author considers toric \(A_n\) bundles over \(\mathbb P^1\) and gives a simple combinatorial criterion for such a bundle not to be smoothable. The counterexample to Prokhorov's conjecture mentioned above is then a complete 3-dimensional toric variety \(X\) which contains a nonsmoothable \(A_1\)-bundle as an open subset.