Sunday, 8 February 2009

sg.symplectic geometry - When should a moment polytope have "smooth" faces?

A codimension d face of a polytope is called rationally smooth if it lies on only d facets, because this is exactly the condition for the corresponding toric variety to have only orbifold singularities (not worse) there.



Is there some good reason that the moment polytope of a full flag manifold G/B should have only smooth faces? It's easy to prove, and it doesn't hold for partial flag manifolds like Gr(2,4) (whose moment polytope is an octahedron). Both of these varieties are smooth, of course, and neither is a toric variety; what the rational smoothness of the faces tells you is that the normalization of a generic T-orbit closure in the full flag manifold is orbifold, and in a Grassmannian it's not.



[Added: in general, if X carries an algebraic action of a torus T, then overlineTcdotx for a generic xinX will be a variety with the same moment polytope as X. That doesn't make it a toric variety under Fulton's book's definition, as it may not be normal.]



Is there any other reason to predict that a given Hamiltonian space X should have a moment polytope with this property?



Motivation: I have another such X, that isn't smooth actually, and its nonabelian moment polytope has this property inside the positive Weyl chamber. I would like to know "why".

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