Singularities and radical initial ideals

Abstract

What kind of reduced monomial schemes can be obtained as a Gr\"obner degeneration of a smooth projective variety? Our conjectured answer is: only Stanley-Reisner schemes associated to acyclic Cohen-Macaulay simplicial complexes. This would imply, in particular, that only curves of genus zero have such a degeneration. We prove this conjecture for degrevlex orders, for elliptic curves over real number fields, for boundaries of cross-polytopes, and for leafless graphs. We discuss consequences for rational and F-rational singularities of algebras with straightening laws.