Effective divisors on Bott-Samelson varieties

Abstract: We compute the cone of effective divisors on a Bott-Samelson variety corresponding to an arbitrary sequence of simple roots. The main tool is a general result concerning effective cones of certain $B$-equivariant $\mathbb{P}^1$ bundles. As an application, we compute the cone of effective codimension-two cycles on Bott-Samelson varieties corresponding to reduced words. We also obtain an auxiliary result giving criteria for a Bott-Samelson variety to contain a dense $B$-orbit, and we construct desingularizations of intersections of Schubert varieties. An appendix exhibits an explicit divisor showing that any Bott-Samelson variety is log Fano.