Lower bounds in real algebraic geometry and orientability of real toric varieties (Q368769)

The paper is devoted to proving a characterization of when a real toric variety is orientable and, as a corollary, to obtaining a lower bound for the number of real solutions to a system of sparse polynomial equations using Newton polytopes and their real projective toric varieties. In Section 2 the authors give an extension of a notion of a small cover first introduced by \textit{M. W. Davis} and \textit{T. Januszkiewicz} [Duke Math. J. 62, No. 2, 417--451 (1991; Zbl 0733.52006)] to not necessarily smooth spaces in terms of gluing of certain cell complexes (Section 2). Then the main results of the paper are proved for the orientability of small covers (Theorem 3.1), of real toric varieties in terms of their fans (Theorem 3.2) and of spherical toric varieties (Theorem 3.4). In Section 4 several applications are introduced, namely orientability is studied for the cases of cross polytopes (Section 4.1) and order polytopes (Section 4.2). Finally, in Theorem 4.3 it is proved that, under some conditions, a lower bound for the number of real solutions to a system of polynomial equations is equal to the absolute value of the degree of a projection map from a spherical toric variety of the corresponding Newton polytope to a sphere (Section 4.3).