Toric partial density functions and stability of toric varieties

Abstract

Let $(L, h)\rightarrow (X, \omega )$ denote a polarized toric Kähler manifold. Fix a toric submanifold $Y$ and denote by $\hat{\rho }_{tk}:X\rightarrow \mathbb {R}$ the partial density function corresponding to the partial Bergman kernel projecting smooth sections of $L^k$ onto holomorphic sections of $L^k$ that vanish to order at least $tk$ along $Y$, for fixed $t>0$ such that $tk\in \mathbb {N}$. We prove the existence of a distributional expansion of $\hat{\rho }_{tk}$ as $k\rightarrow \infty$, including the identification of the coefficient of $k^{n-1}$ as a distribution on $X$. This expansion is used to give a direct proof that if $\omega$ has constant scalar curvature, then $(X, L)$ must be slope semi-stable with respect to $Y$ (cf. Ross and Thomas in J Differ Geom 72(3): 429–466, 2006). Similar results are also obtained for more general partial density functions. These results have analogous applications to the study of toric K-stability of toric varieties.