Sagbi bases of Cox-Nagata rings (Q967463)

The Cox ring of the blowup of projective space blown up at a finite set of points can be described as an invariant ring of an unipotent group, and this construction has been used by Nagata to answer Hilbert's 14th problem. Here the authors introduce a technique for computing generators of such a Cox-Nagata ring that behave well under degeneration (called sagbi basis). This allows to compute the Hilbert function of the Cox-Nagata ring in many interesting situations. The first case is the blowup of the projective plane at at most 8 general points, i.e. a Del Pezzo surface. Here, the computation shows that the Cox ring of the surface is the quotient of an ideal generated by quadrics, giving a new proof for the Batyrev-Popov conjecture. In the second case, the ring is associated to a trivalent phylogenetic tree. The Hilbert function was considered by \textit{W. Buczyńska} and \textit{J. Wyśniewski} [J. Eur. Math. Soc. (JEMS) 9, No. 3, 609--635 (2007; Zbl 1147.14027)], and this paper answers a question that was left open there. The third example is related to zonotopal algebra [cf. \textit{O. Holtz, A. Ron}, Zonotopal algebra, preprint, \url{arXiv:0708.2632}]. Here the points which are blown up are the intersection points of a hyperplane arrangement.