Semistable degeneration of toric varieties and their hypersurfaces (Q871737)

The article under review contains a general method to construct semi-stable degeneration of toric varieties and their hypersurfaces. Among other things, the author proves that if \(\Gamma\) is a non-singular semi-stable subdivision of a polytope \(\Delta\) then there exists a toric variety \(\widetilde{X}\) and a map \(p:\widetilde{X} \rightarrow \mathbb{C}\) such that \(p\) is a semi-stable degeneration of \(X_{\Delta}\) to \(p^{-1}(0)\). The dual graph of the fiber \(p^{-1}(0)\) is given by the dual graph of the subdivision \(\Gamma\) and a component in \(p^{-1}(0)\) is the toric variety defined by corresponding subpolytope in \(\Gamma\). Using the results and constructions given in the article, the author provides many examples including the classical example of degeneration of \(K3\) surface into four copies of blow-up of \(\mathbb{CP}^{2}\) along 6 points and its natural generalizations into higher dimensions such as Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces of \(\mathbb{CP}^{n}\).