English

A superpotential for Grassmannian Schubert varieties

Algebraic Geometry 2025-07-29 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

While mirror symmetry for flag varieties and Grassmannians has been extensively studied, Schubert varieties in the Grassmannian are singular, and hence standard mirror symmetry statements are not well-defined. Nevertheless, in this article we introduce a ``superpotential'' WλW^{\lambda} for each Grassmannian Schubert variety XλX_{\lambda}, generalizing the Marsh-Rietsch superpotential for Grassmannians, and we show that WλW^{\lambda} governs many toric degenerations of XλX_{\lambda}. We also generalize the ``polytopal mirror theorem'' for Grassmannians from our previous work: namely, for any cluster seed GG for XλX_{\lambda}, we construct a corresponding Newton-Okounkov convex body ΔGλ\Delta_G^{\lambda}, and show that it coincides with the superpotential polytope ΓGλ\Gamma_G^{\lambda}, that is, it is cut out by the inequalities obtained by tropicalizing an associated Laurent expansion of WλW^{\lambda}. This gives us a toric degeneration of the Schubert variety XλX_{\lambda} to the (singular) toric variety Y(Nλ)Y(\mathcal{N}_{\lambda}) of the Newton-Okounkov body. Finally, for a particular cluster seed G=GrecλG=G^\lambda_{\mathrm{rec}} we show that the toric variety Y(Nλ)Y(\mathcal{N}_{\lambda}) has a small toric desingularisation, and we describe an intermediate partial desingularisation Y(Fλ)Y(\mathcal{F}_\lambda) that is Gorenstein Fano. Many of our results extend to more general varieties in the Grassmannian.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.00734,
  title  = {A superpotential for Grassmannian Schubert varieties},
  author = {Konstanze Rietsch and Lauren Williams},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00734},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

70 pages, 26 figures. v2: minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:30:35.572Z