Varieties covered by affine spaces, uniformly rational varieties and their cones

It was shown in Kaliman and Zaidenberg (2023) [26] 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 article we extend this to smooth projective spherical varieties (in particular, toric varieties) successively blown up along smooth subvarieties. The same holds, more generally, for uniformly rational projective varieties, in particular, for projective varieties covered by affine spaces. It occurs also that stably uniformly rational complete varieties are elliptic.(c) 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.