Secant cumulants and toric geometry

We study the secant line variety of the Segre product of projective spaces using special cumulant coordinates adapted for secant varieties. We show that the secant variety is covered by open normal toric varieties. We prove that in cumulant coordinates its ideal is generated by binomial quadrics. We present new results on the local structure of the secant variety. In particular, we show that it has rational singularities and we give a description of the singular locus. We also classify all secant varieties that are Gorenstein. Moreover, generalizing (Sturmfels and Zwiernik 2012), we obtain analogous results for the tangential variety.Comment: Some improvements to previous results, with other minor changes. Updated reference

Pfaffian representations of cubic threefolds

Given a cubic hypersurface $X\subset \mathbb{P}^4$, we study the existence of Pfaffian representations of $X$, namely of $6\times 6$ skew-symmetric matrices of linear forms $M$ such that $X$ is defined by the equation $Pf(M)=0$. It was known that such a matrix always exists whenever $X$ is smooth. Here we prove that the same holds whenever $X$ is singular, hence that every cubic threefold is Pfaffian