EFFECTIVE DIVISORS ON BOTT–SAMELSON VARIETIES

Abstract

We compute the cone of effective divisors on a Bott–Samelson variety corresponding to an arbitrary sequence of simple roots. The main tool is a general result concerning effective cones of certain B-equivariant ℙ1 bundles. As an application, we compute the cone of effective codimension-two cycles on Bott–Samelson varieties corresponding to reduced words. We also obtain an auxiliary result giving criteria for a Bott–Samelson variety to contain a dense B-orbit, and we construct desingularizations of intersections of Schubert varieties. An appendix exhibits an explicit divisor showing that any Bott–Samelson variety is log Fano.