Chow quotients of \(\mathbb{C}^*\)-actions (Q6924933)

Consider a smooth complex projective variety \(X\) with a nontrivial action of the torus \({\mathbb C}^*\) and an ample line bundle \(L\) on \(X\). The fixed-point components and the weights of a linearization of the action lead to a description of its geometric quotients. In particular, the general orbit converges to two fixed-point components, called the sink and the source, which defines two geometric quotients and a birational transformation, say \(\Psi\) between them. On the other hand, the normalized Chow quotient of the action is the closure of the subscheme of the Chow variety of \(X\) which parametrizes the closures of the general orbits of the action. In the paper under review the authors investigate the relationship between these two objects. In fact, under certain assumptions (see Thm. 1.1), they show how to produce the Chow quotient via suitable blowups of the geometric quotients. Figure (2) in Thm. 1.1 makes explicit such construction. Moreover, the smoothness of the Chow quotient is proven for \(X\) convex (\(H^1({\mathbb P}^1, \mu^*TX)=0\) for any \(\mu:{\mathbb P}^1 \to X\)), where the previous description of the maps provides a strong factorization of the birational map \(\Psi\) via the Chow quotient.