Paper detail

Voronoi tilings, toric arrangements and degenerations of line bundles II

We describe limits of line bundles on nodal curves in terms of toric arrangements associated to Voronoi tilings of Euclidean spaces. These tilings encode information on the relationship between the possibly infinitely many limits, and ultimately give rise to a new definition of limit linear series. This article and its first and third part companion parts are the first in a series aimed to explore this new approach. In the first part, we set up the combinatorial framework and showed how graphs weighted with integer lengths associated to the edges provide tilings of Euclidean spaces by polytopes associated to the graph itself and to its subgraphs. In this part, we describe the arrangements of toric varieties associated to these tilings. Roughly speaking, the normal fan to each polytope in the tiling corresponds to a toric variety, and these toric varieties are glued together in an arrangement according to how the polytopes meet. We provide a thorough description of these toric arrangements from different perspectives: by using normal fans, as unions of torus orbits, by describing the (infinitely many) polynomial equations defining them in products of doubly infinite chains of projective lines, and as degenerations of algebraic tori. These results will be of use in the third part to achieve our goal of describing all stable limits of a family of line bundles along a degenerating family of curves.