We show how to construct certain homogeneous deformations for rational normal varieties with codimension one torus action. This can then be used to construct homogeneous deformations of any toric variety in arbitrary degree. For locally trivial deformations coming from this construction, we calculate the image of the Kodaira-Spencer map. We then show that for a smooth complete toric variety, our homogeneous deformations span the space of first-order deformations.License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see http://www.ams.org/license/jour-dist-license.pdf
NATHAN OWEN ILTEN AND ROBERT VOLLMERTThe goal of this paper is to generalize the results of [Ilt10b] in several directions. First of all, we construct multi-parameter deformations of varieties of arbitrary dimension which are also not necessarily smooth. Secondly, we will look not only at deformations of toric varieties but also deformations of rational T -varieties of complexity one, that is, rational normal varieties admitting an effective codimension one torus action.Much as an n-dimensional toric variety can be described by an ndimensional fan, an n-dimensional T -variety X of complexity one can be described by a curve and some n − 1-dimensional combinatorial data. We then construct a deformation of X by somehow deforming the corresponding combinatorial data. In section 1, we give a short overview of the necessary theory of T -varieties. We then show how to construct homogeneous deformations of affine T -varieties in section 2. Here we also describe the fibers of such deformations explicitly as T -varieties. Note that the deformation theory of affine T -varieties is being further developed by the second author in [Vol10]. As a special case, we can of course consider toric varieties with an action by some subtorus. We describe this in detail in section 3 and show how to recover the deformations constructed by Altmann. In particular, we have a very natural description of toric deformations with non-negative degree, which are essential for constructing homogeneous deformations of complete toric varieties.In section 4 we then show how to glue the deformations of affine T -varieties together to construct deformations of non-affine T -varieties. As in the affine case, we can also describe the fibers of such deformations explicitly as Tvarieties. Restricting to the case of locally trivial deformations, we then calculate the Kodaira-Spencer map in section 5.Of course, non-affine toric varieties again provide an example where our construction can be put to use. In section 6 we reformulate our Kodaira-Spencer calculation in nicer terms for this special case. For a smooth complete toric variety X, we then construct certain special deformations and show that they in fact span T 1 X . Thus, at least for smooth complete toric varieties, our deformations provide a kind of skeleton of the versal deformation.Our approach has some aspects in common with the independent work of Mavlyutov; both approaches construct deformations, via Minkowski decomposition,...