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 $I^{\text{sat}}/I$, where $I$ denotes an ideal generated by $n+1$ generic forms, $n$ is the dimension of $X$ and $I^{\text{sat}}$ 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 explote a new formula for computing toric residues of the product of two forms.