Uniform K-stability of polarized spherical varieties

Abstract

We express notions of K-stability of polarized spherical varieties in terms of combinatorial data, vastly generalizing the case of toric varieties. We then provide a combinatorial sufficient condition for G-uniform K-stability by studying the corresponding convex geometric problem. Thanks to recent work of Chi Li and a remark by Yuji Odaka, this provides an explicitly checkable sufficient condition for the existence of constant scalar curvature Kähler metrics. As a side effect, we show that, on several families of spherical varieties, G-uniform K-stability is equivalent to K-polystability with respect to G-equivariant special test configurations for polarizations close to the anticanonical bundle.