Compact moduli of hyperplane arrangements

Abstract

The minimal model program suggests a compactification of the moduli space of hyperplane arrangements which is a moduli space of stable pairs. Here, a stable pair consists of a scheme X which is a degeneration of projective space and a divisor D=D_1+..+D_n on X which is a limit of hyperplane arrangements. For example, in the 1-dimensional case, the stable pairs are stable curves of genus 0 with n marked points. Kapranov has defined an alternative compactification using his Chow quotient construction, which may be described fairly explicitly. We prove that these two compactifications coincide. We deduce a description of all stable pairs.