We introduce the notion of cracked polytope, and -making use of joint work with Coates and Kasprzyk -construct the associated toric variety X as a subvariety of a smooth toric variety Y under certain conditions. Restricting to the case in which this subvariety is a complete intersection, we present a sufficient condition for a smoothing of X to exist inside Y . We exhibit a relative anti-canonical divisor for this smoothing of X, and show that the general member is simple normal crossings.Conventions. Throughout this article N ∼ = Z n will refer to an n-dimensional lattice, and M := hom(N, Z) will refer to the dual lattice. Given a ring R we write N R := N ⊗ Z R and M R := M ⊗ Z R. For brevity we let [k] denote the set {1, . . . , k} for each k ∈ Z ≥1 . We work over an algebraically closed field k of characteristic zero.
Cracked polytopesIn this section we introduce the notion of cracked polytope, which will form our main object of study, and, in the Fano setting, characterize its dual polytope. We will assume basic ideas and results from toric geometry -see [9, 10] -throughout.