Deforming Stanley-Reisner schemes (Q5962318)

The present work studies deformations of projective Stanley-Reisner schemes associated to combinatorial manifolds. It continues work by the authors, who introduced in [\textit{K. Altmann} and \textit{J. A. Christophersen}, Manuscr. Math. 115, No. 3, 361--378 (2004; Zbl 1071.13008)] the cotangent cohomology of Stanley-Reisner rings for arbitrary simplicial complexes. The two main achievements of the present paper are the following. First, the authors give detailed descriptions of first order deformations and obstruction spaces and even dimension formulas in some cases (sections 4 and 5, theorems 4.6, 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7). Second, versal spaces of algebraic deformations are given for certain Stanley-Reisner surfaces, namely 2-dimensional combinatorial manifolds with vertex valencies not greater than six (section 6).