Toric Sylvester forms

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the structure of the saturation of ideals generated by sparse homogeneous polynomials over a projective toric variety X with respect to the irrelevant ideal of X. As our main results, we establish a duality property and make it explicit by introducing toric Sylvester forms, under a certain positivity assumption on X. In particular, we prove that toric Sylvester forms yield bases of some graded components of Isat/I, where I denotes an ideal generated by n+1 generic forms, n is the dimension of X and Isat is the saturation of I with respect to the irrelevant ideal of the Cox ring of X. Then, to illustrate the relevance of toric Sylvester forms we provide three consequences in elimination theory over smooth toric varieties: (1) we introduce a new family of elimination matrices that can be used to solve sparse polynomial systems by means of linear algebra methods, including overdetermined polynomial systems; (2) by incorporating toric Sylvester forms to the classical Koszul complex associated to a polynomial system, we obtain new expressions of the sparse resultant as a determinant of a complex; (3) we explore the computation of the toric residue of the product of two forms.