Higher-dimensional Losev-Manin spaces and their geometry

Abstract

The classical Losev-Manin space is a toric compactification of the moduli space of $n$ points in the affine line modulo translation and scaling. Motivated by this, we study its higher-dimensional toric counterparts, which compactify the moduli space of $n$ distinct labeled points in affine space modulo translation and scaling. We show that these moduli spaces are a fibration over a product of projective spaces -- with fibers isomorphic to the Losev-Manin space -- and that they are isomorphic to the normalization of a Chow quotient. Moreover, we present a criterion to decide whether the blow-up of a toric variety along the closure of a subtorus is a Mori dream space. As an application, we demonstrate that a related generalization of the moduli space of pointed rational curves constructed by Chen, Gibney, and Krashen is not a Mori dream space when the number of points is at least nine, regardless of the dimension.