Deformations of rational \(T\)-varieties (Q2894544)

The paper deals with homogeneous deformations of toric varieties and equivariant deformations of rational \(T\)-varieties of complexity one. The latter are a generalization of the first via restricting the big torus to the kernel of the character corresponding to the fixed (multi-) degree.NEWLINENEWLINEEven for the classical case of toric varieties, the description of the results makes use of the language of polyhedral divisors and divisorial fans encoding \(T\)-varieties. The reason is that the nearby fibers (and sometimes also the total space) of the deformations are no longer toric. Their description requires a free movability of polyhedra along an algebraic variety, e.g.\ along \(\mathbb P^1\). In these terms, degenerations of \(T\)-varieties correspond to the merging of two polyhedra into their common Minkowski sum.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the special case of smooth, complete toric varieties, the authors show that the homogeneous deformations obtained this way span, via the Kodaira-Spencer map, the whole vector space of infinitesimal first order deformations.