Stringy invariants for horospherical varieties of complexity one

Abstract

In this paper we determine the stringy motivic volume of log terminal horospherical $G$-varieties of complexity one, where $G$ is a connected reductive linear algebraic group. The stringy motivic volume of a log terminal variety is an invariant of singularities which was introduced by Batyrev and plays an important role in mirror symmetry for Calabi--Yau varieties. A horospherical $G$-variety of complexity one is a normal $G$-variety which is equivariantly birational to a product $C \times G/H$, where $C$ is a smooth projective curve and the closed subgroup $H$ contains a maximal unipotent subgroup of $G$. The simplest example of such a variety is a normal surface with a non-trivial $\mathbb{C}^{\star}$-action. Our formula extends the results of Batyrev--Moreau [BM13] on stringy invariants of horospherical embeddings. The proof involves the study of the arc space of a horospherical variety of complexity one and a combinatorial description of its orbits. In contrast to [BM13], the number of orbits is no longer countable, which adds significant difficulties to the problem. As a corollary of our main theorem, we obtain a smoothness criterion using a comparison of the stringy and usual Euler characteristics.