Varieties covered by affine spaces and their cones

I. Arzhantsev, S. Kaliman, M. Zaidenberg

Published 2023-04-17Version 1

It was shown in arXiv:2303.02036 that the affine cones over flag manifolds and rational smooth projective surfaces are elliptic in the sense of Gromov. The latter remains true after successive blowups of points on these varieties. In the present note we extend this to smooth projective spherical varieties (in particular, toric varieties) successively blown up along linear subvarieties. The same also holds, more generally, for projective varieties covered by affine spaces.