Characteristic classes of singular toric varieties

In this paper we compute the motivic Chern classes and homology Hirzebruch characteristic classes of (possibly singular) toric varieties, which in the complete case fit nicely with a generalized Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. As special cases, we obtain new (or recover well-known) formulae for the Baum-Fulton-MacPherson Todd (or MacPherson-Chern) classes of toric varieties, as well as for the Thom-Milnor L-classes of simplicial projective toric varieties. We present two different perspectives for the computation of these characteristic classes of toric varieties. First, we take advantage of the torus-orbit decomposition and the motivic properties of the motivic Chern and resp. homology Hirzebruch classes to express the latter in terms of dualizing sheaves and resp. the (dual) Todd classes of closures of orbits. This method even applies to torus-invariant subspaces of a given toric variety. The obtained formula is then applied to weighted lattice point counting in lattice polytopes and their subcomplexes, yielding generalized Pick-type formulae. Secondly, in the case of simplicial toric varieties, we compute our characteristic classes by using the Lefschetz-Riemann-Roch theorem of Edidin-Graham in the context of the geometric quotient description of such varieties. In this setting, we define mock Hirzebruch classes of simplicial toric varieties and investigate the difference between the (actual) homology Hirzebruch class and the mock Hirzebruch class. We show that this difference is localized on the singular locus, and we obtain a formula for it in which the contribution of each singular cone is identified explicitly. Finally, the two methods of computing characteristic classes are combined for proving several characteristic class formulae originally obtained by Cappell and Shaneson in the early 1990s.Comment: v2: new references added; many results hold now in greater generality, e.g. for closed algebraic toric invariant subspaces of toric varieties which have only DuBois singularities by work of Ishida; motivic Chern classes are also computed; new examples are worked out in detai

Computing torus-equivariant K-theory of singular varieties

This expository note surveys some results on equivariant K-theory of varieties with a torus action, focusing on recent work with Sam Payne and Richard Gonzales. It is based on my contribution to the Clifford Lectures at Tulane University in March 2015.Comment: 16 page

Computing toric degenerations of flag varieties

We compute toric degenerations arising from the tropicalization of the full flag varieties $\mathcal{F}\ell_4$ and $\mathcal{F}\ell_5$ embedded in a product of Grassmannians. For $\mathcal{F}\ell_4$ and $\mathcal{F}\ell_5$ we compare toric degenerations arising from string polytopes and the FFLV polytope with those obtained from the tropicalization of the flag varieties. We also present a general procedure to find toric degenerations in the cases where the initial ideal arising from a cone of the tropicalization of a variety is not prime.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figure