Normalized height of projective toric varieties

Abstract

We present an explicit expression for the normalized height of a projective toric variety. This expression decomposes as a sum of local contributions, each term being the integral of a certain function, concave and piecewise linear-affine. More generally, we obtain an explicit expression for the normalized multiheight of a torus with respect to several monomial embeddings. The set of functions introduced behaves as an arithmetic analog of the polytope classically associated with the torus action. Besides the formulae for the height and multiheight, we show that this object behaves in a natural way with respect to several standard constructions: decomposition into orbits, joins, Segre products and Veronese embeddings. The proof follows an indirect way: instead of the definition of the normalized height, we rely on the computation of an appropriate arithmetic Hilbert function.