Hirota varieties and rational nodal curves (Q6170826)

The Hirota variety associated to an irreducible rational nodal curve of genus \(g\), first introduced in [\textit{D. Agostini} et al., J. Symb. Comput. 114, 282--301 (2023; Zbl 1495.14046)] for curves with at worst nodal singularities, lives in the parameter space given by the product of the algebraic torus \((\mathbb{C}^*)^{2g}\) with some coordinates. This variety parameterizes solutions to the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation arising from a degenerate Riemann theta function. Finding solutions to the KP equation is related to the Schottky problem, in that a theta function satisfies the KP equation when the corresponding abelian variety is the Jacobian of a curve. The Schottky problem concerns the relations between the periods coming from a curve (Riemann surface). Roughly, it is a question of finding criteria so that a matrix of the periods belonging to the Siegel half-space is the matrix of the periods of a curve. Geometrically, Schottky's problem consists in characterizing the Jacobians among all the Abelian mainly polarized varieties. The aim of this paper is to study in detail the Hirota variety arising from a rational nodal curve. Of particular interest is the irreducible subvariety defined as the image of a parameterization map, the authors call this the main component. Proving that this is an irreducible component of the Hirota variety corresponds to solving a weak Schottky problem for rational nodal curves. The authors solve this problem up to genus nine using computational tools. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 deals with the main component of the Hirota variety. The authors introduce the Hirota variety of a rational nodal curve and discuss its main component. They prove for genus \(g\leq 9\) that this is an irreducible component of dimension \(3g\) and they explain how this relates to the Schottky problem. Section 2 is devoted to combinatorics of the Hirota variety. The results in this section describe in detail facts that the authors use in many of the proofs in the previous section. They study the equations of the main component of the Hirota variety and how they relate to the combinatorics of the cube.