Coordinate-wise powers of algebraic varieties (Q784763)

This article studies the image \(X^{\circ r}\) of a subvariety \(X\) of \(\mathbb{P}^n\) under the map \(\varphi_r\colon [x_0:\ldots:x_n] \mapsto [x_0^r:\ldots:x_n^r]\), mostly for \(r \in \mathbb{N}\), but also for negative exponents (with possible extensions to rational exponents). For \(r = -1\), the map \(\varphi_r\) is a Cremona transformation and \(X^{\circ -1}\) is the well-known reciprocal variety. The degree of \(X^{\circ r}\) is given by the formula \[ \deg X^{\circ r} = \frac{f}{s} r^{\dim X} \deg X \] where \(f\) and \(s\) are the numbers of elements of a certain finite projective subgroup that fix or stabilize \(X\), respectively. As application, the authors compute the degree of the variety of orthostochastic matrices and the \(\varphi_r\)-image of linear subspaces. Their degree depends only on the subspace's linear matroid. The authors explicitly describe the \(\varphi_r\)-image of hypersurfaces and explain the difficulties in extending these results to arbitrary varieties. This leads to the concept of ``\(r\)-th power bases'' and raises interesting questions for further research. The last chapter of this rich article is dedicated to the classification of the \(\varphi_2\)-images of low dimensional linear spaces and a description of the \(\varphi_2\)-image of general linear spaces of arbitrary dimension and large co-dimension.