On base loci of higher fundamental forms of toric varieties

Abstract: We study the base locus of the higher fundamental forms of a projective toric variety $X$ at a general point. More precisely we consider the closure $X$ of the image of a map $({\mathbb C}^*)^k\to {\mathbb P}^n$, sending $t$ to the vector of Laurent monomials with exponents $p_0,\dots,p_n\in {\mathbb Z}^k$. We prove that the $m$-th fundamental form of such an $X$ at a general point has non empty base locus if and only if the points $p_i$ lie on a suitable degree-$m$ affine hypersurface. We then restrict to the case in which the points $p_i$ are all the lattice points of a lattice polytope and we give some applications of the above result. In particular we provide a classification for the second fundamental forms on toric surfaces, and we also give some new examples of weighted $3$-dimensional projective spaces whose blowing up at a general point is not Mori dream.