Irrational toric varieties and secondary polytopes

Abstract: The space of torus translations and degenerations of a projective toric variety forms a toric variety associated to the secondary fan of the integer points in the polytope corresponding to the toric variety. This is used to identify a moduli space of real degenerations with the secondary polytope. A configuration A of real vectors gives an irrational projective toric variety in a simplex. We identify a space of translations and degenerations of the irrational projective toric variety with the secondary polytope of A. For this, we develop a theory of irrational toric varieties associated to arbitrary fans. When the fan is rational, the irrational toric variety is the nonnegative part of the corresponding classical toric variety. When the fan is the normal fan of a polytope, the irrational toric variety is homeomorphic to that polytope.