Standard monomial theory and toric degenerations of Richardson varieties in the Grassmannian (Q825541)

Toric degenerations are a particularly useful tool for describing algebraic properties of varieties in terms of combinatorics of polytopes and polyhedral fans. The goal of the paper under review is to construct a family of toric degenerations for Richardson varieties inside the Grassmannian. To do this, the authors consider a family of matching fields, which were originally introduced by Sturmfels and Zelevinsky for studying certain Newton polytopes. They associate a weight vector to each block diagonal matching field and characterise when the corresponding initial ideal is toric, thus providing a family of toric degenerations for Richardson varieties. Given a Richardson variety \(X_{w}^v\) and a weight vector \(\mathbf{w}_\ell\) arising from a matching field, they consider two ideals: an ideal \(G_{k,n,l}|_{w}^{v}\) obtained by restricting the initial of the Plücker ideal to a smaller polynomial ring, and a toric ideal defined as the kernel of a monomial map \(\phi_{l}|_{w}^{v}\). First they characterise the monomial-free ideals of form \(G_{k,n,l}|_{w}^{v}\). Next they construct a family of tableaux in bijection with semi-standard Young tableaux which leads to a monomial basis for the corresponding quotient ring. Finally, they prove that when \(G_{k,n,l}|_{w}^{v}\) is monomial-free and the initial ideal \(\mathrm{in}_{\mathbf{w}_l}(I(X_{w}^v))\) is generated by degree two polynomials, then the ideals \(\mathrm{in}_{\mathbf{w}_l}(I(X_{w}^v))\), \(G_{k,n,l}|_{w}^{v}\) and \(\ker(\phi_{l}|_{w}^{v})\) are all equal, and provide a toric degeneration for the Richardson variety \(X_{w}^v\) .