ECH capacities, Ehrhart theory, and toric varieties

Abstract

ECH capacities were developed by Hutchings to study embedding problems for symplectic $4$-manifolds with boundary. They have found especial success in the case of certain toric symplectic manifolds where many of the computations resemble calculations found in cohomology of $\mathbb{Q}$-line bundles on toric varieties, or in lattice point counts for rational polytopes. We formalise this observation in the case of convex toric lattice domains $X_\Omega$ by constructing a natural polarised toric variety $(Y_{\Sigma(\Omega)},D_\Omega)$ containing the all the information of the ECH capacities of $X_\Omega$ in purely algebro-geometric terms. Applying the Ehrhart theory of the polytopes involved in this construction gives some new results in the combinatorialisation and asymptotics of ECH capacities for convex toric domains.