Deformations of smooth toric surfaces (Q617833)

The author presents some results dealing with the deformation theory of complete smooth toric varieties. First he computes the vector space of infinitesimal deformations \(T^{1}_{Y}\) of such a variety \(Y\). This essentially boils down to counting the number of connected components in certain graphs coming from hyperplane sections of the fan defining the toric variety. The formula takes a particularly simple form for smooth, complete toric surfaces; actually in this case it is also shown that \(Y\) is unobstructed. In addition, he proves that a complete, smooth surface is rigid if and only if it is Fano. Next, for a given complete, smooth toric surface he constructs homogeneous one-parameter deformations by means of Minkowski decompositions of polyhedral decompositions, computes their images under the Kodaira-Spencer map, and proves that they span \(T^{1}_{Y}\).