Characteristic classes of affine varieties and Plücker formulas for affine morphisms (Q679661)

Summary: An enumerative problem on a variety \(V\) is usually solved by reduction to intersection theory in the cohomology of a compactification of \(V\). However, if the problem is invariant under a ``nice'' group action on \(V\) (so that \(V\) is spherical), then many authors suggested a better home for intersection theory: the direct limit of the cohomology rings of all equivariant compactifications of \(V\). We call this limit the affine cohomology of \(V\) and construct affine characteristic classes of subvarieties of a complex torus, taking values in the affine cohomology of the torus.{ }This allows us to make the first steps in computing affine Thom polynomials. Classical Thom polynomials count how many fibers of a generic proper map of a smooth variety have a prescribed collection of singularities and our affine version addresses the same question for generic polynomial maps of affine algebraic varieites. This notion is also motivated by developing an intersection-theoretic approach to tropical correspondence theorems: they can be reduced to the computation of affine Thom polynomials, because the fundamental class of a variety in the affine cohomology is encoded by the tropical fan of this variety.{ }The first concrete answer that we obtain is the affine version of what were, historically speaking, the first three Thom polynomials--the Plücker formulas for the degree and the number of cusps and nodes of a projectively dual curve. This, in particular, characterizes toric varieties whose projective dual is a hypersurface, computes the tropical fan of the variety of double tangent hyperplanes to a toric variety, and describes the Newton polytope of the hypersurface of non-Morse polynomials of a given degree. We also make a conjecture on the general form of affine Thom polynomials; a key ingredient is the \(n\)-ary fan, generalizing the secondary polytope.