Bunches of cones in the divisor class group -- A new combinatorial language for toric varieties

As an alternative to the description of a toric variety by a fan in the lattice of one parameter subgroups, we present a new language in terms of what we call bunches -- these are certain collections of cones in the vector space of rational divisor classes. The correspondence between these bunches and fans is based on classical Gale duality. The new combinatorial language allows a much more natural description of geometric phenomena around divisors of toric varieties than the usual method by fans does. For example, the numerically effective cone and the ample cone of a toric variety can be read off immediately from its bunch. Moreover, the language of bunches appears to be useful for classification problems.Comment: Minor changes, to appear in Int. Math. Res. No

Three lectures on Cox rings

Notes of an introductory course given at the conference "Torsors: Theory and Applications" in Edinburgh, January 2011.Comment: Minor corrections, 37 page

Homogeneous coordinates for algebraic varieties

We associate to every divisorial (e.g. smooth) variety $X$ with only constant invertible global functions and finitely generated Picard group a $Pic(X)$-graded homogeneous coordinate ring. This generalizes the usual homogeneous coordinate ring of the projective space and constructions of Cox and Kajiwara for smooth and divisorial toric varieties. We show that the homogeneous coordinate ring defines in fact a fully faithful functor. For normal complex varieties $X$ with only constant global functions, we even obtain an equivalence of categories. Finally, the homogeneous coordinate ring of a locally factorial complete irreducible variety with free finitely generated Picard group turns out to be a Krull ring admitting unique factorization.Comment: 30 page

Demushkin's Theorem in Codimension One

Demushkin's Theorem says that any two toric structures on an affine variety X are conjugate in the automorphism group of X. We provide the following extension: Let an (n-1)-dimensional torus T act effectively on an n-dimensional affine toric variety X. Then T is conjugate in the automorphism group of X to a subtorus of the big torus of X.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Math.