Euler Discriminant of Complements of Hyperplanes

Abstract

The Euler discriminant of a family of very affine varieties is defined as the locus where the Euler characteristic drops. In this work, we study the Euler discriminant of families of complements of hyperplanes. We prove that the Euler discriminant is a hypersurface in the space of coefficients, and provide its defining equation in two cases: (1) when the coefficients are generic, and (2) when they are constrained to a proper subspace. In the generic case, we show that the multiplicities of the components can be recovered combinatorially. This analysis also recovers the singularities of an Euler integral. In the appendix, we discuss a relation to cosmological correlators.