The structure of monotone blow-ups in symplectic toric geometry and a question of McDuff

Abstract

Monotone polytopes, also known as smooth reflexive polytopes, are the polytopes associated to monotone symplectic toric manifolds and Gorenstein Fano toric varieties. We first show that the only monotone polytopes admitting blow-ups at vertices are the simplex and the result of a codimension-two blow-up in it (this is the polyhedral version of a result of Bonavero from 2002). Then we show that the $n$-simplex admits disjoint blow-ups at faces if and only if the faces are disjoint and have dimensions adding up to $n-1$ or $n-2$. These results answer a question posed by Dusa McDuff in 2011.