Acyclic curves and group actions on affine toric surfaces

Abstract: We show that every irreducible, simply connected curve on a toric affine surface X over the field of complex numbers is an orbit closure of a multiplicative group action on X. It follows that up to the action of the automorphism group Aut(X) there are only finitely many non-equivalent embeddings of the affine line in X. A similar description is given for simply connected curves in the quotients of the affine plane by small finite linear groups. We provide also an analog of the Jung-van der Kulk theorem for affine toric surfaces, and apply this to study actions of algebraic groups on such surfaces.