The polyhedral Hodge number \(h^{2,1}\) and vanishing of obstructions (Q5932149)

The authors first give an alternative description of some of the polyhedral Hodge spaces introduced by \textit{M. Brion} [Tohoku Math. J. (2) 49, 1-32 (1997; Zbl 0881.52008)]. For a polytope \(\Delta\) defined over a subfield \(K\subset \mathbb R\), instead of starting directly from its normal fan as Brion does, they consider the cone over \(\Delta\) in \(K^{n+1}\) and define invariants \(D^k(\Delta)\) to be the cohomology groups arising from the cohomological system obtained by associating to each face of the cone its linear span. It turns out that for \(k>1\), the vector space \(D^k(\Delta)\) equals Brion's Hodge space \(H^{k,1}(\Delta)\). By analyzing the spectral sequence relating the D-invariants of a polytope to those of its faces, the authors obtain an explicit set of equations describing \(D^2(\Delta)\) as a \(K\)-vector subspace of a certain larger vector space under the assumption that \(D^1\) and \(D^2\) vanish for every \(3\)-dimensional face of \(\Delta\). With this description they can prove the main result, namely vanishing of \(D^2\) for a certain class of polytopes whose \(3\)-faces are all pyramids. For a lattice polytope, this vanishing result has an interpretation in the context of deformation theory. As the authors explain, there is a close relation between the space \(D^k(\Delta)\) and (after extension of scalars to complex numbers) the cotangent cohomology module \(T^k(X_{\text{cone}(\Delta)})\) describing the deformations of the toric Gorenstein singularity \(X_{\text{cone}(\Delta)}\) associated to the cone over the polytope \(\Delta\). However, in general the modules \(T^k\) depend on the lattice structure, whereas the D-invariants only depend on the polytope up to projective equivalence. Nevertheless the authors can give sufficient conditions on the lattice polytope ensuring that the modules \(T^k\) are in fact determined by its D-invariants. These conditions in particular imply vanishing of \(T^2\) for the corresponding class of toric Gorenstein singularities.