Cox rings of morphisms and resolution of singularities

Abstract: We extend the Cox-Hu-Keel construction of the Cox rings to any proper birational morphisms of normal noetherian schemes. It allows the representation of any proper birational morphism by a map of schemes with mild singularities with torus actions. In a particular case, the notion generalizes the combinatorial construction of Satriano and the recent construction of multiple weighted blow-ups on Artin-stacks by Abramovich-Quek. The latter can be viewed as an extension of stack theoretic blow-ups by Abramovich, Temkin, and Wlodarczyk, a similar construction of McQuillan and the author's recent cobordant blow-ups at weighted centers to a more general situation of arbitrary locally monomial centers. We show some applications of this operation to the resolution of singularities over a field of any characteristic.