Cohomology Rings of Toric Bundles and the Ring of Conditions

Abstract

The celebrated BKK Theorem expresses the number of roots of a system of generic Laurent polynomials in terms of the mixed volume of the corresponding system of Newton polytopes. In Pukhlikov and Khovanskiĭ (Algebra i Analiz 4(4):188–216, 1992), Pukhlikov and the second author noticed that the cohomology ring of smooth projective toric varieties over \({\mathbb {C}}\) can be computed via the BKK Theorem. This complemented the known descriptions of the cohomology ring of toric varieties, like the one in terms of Stanley–Reisner algebras. In Sankaran and Uma (Comment Math Helv 78(3):540–554, 2003), Sankaran and Uma generalized the “Stanley–Reisner description” to the case of toric bundles, i.e., equivariant compactifications of (not necessarily algebraic) torus principal bundles. We provide a description of the cohomology ring of toric bundles which is based on a generalization of the BKK Theorem, and thus extends the approach by Pukhlikov and the second author. Indeed, for every cohomology class of the base of the toric bundle, we obtain a BKK-type theorem. Furthermore, our proof relies on a description of graded-commutative algebras which satisfy Poincaré duality. From this computation of the cohomology ring of toric bundles, we obtain a description of the ring of conditions of horospherical homogeneous spaces as well as a version of Brion–Kazarnovskii theorem for them. We conclude the manuscript with a number of examples. In particular, we apply our results to toric bundles over a full flag variety G/B. The description that we get generalizes the corresponding description of the cohomology ring of toric varieties as well as the one of full flag varieties G/B previously obtained by Kaveh (J Lie Theory 21(2):263–283, 2011).