Fixed point loci of moduli spaces of sheaves on toric varieties

Extending work of Klyachko and Perling, we develop a combinatorial description of pure equivariant sheaves of any dimension on an arbitrary nonsingular tone variety X. Using geometric invariant theory (GIT), this allows us to construct explicit moduli spaces of pure equivariant sheaves on X corepresenting natural moduli functors (similar to work of Payne in the case of equivariant vector bundles). The action of the algebraic torus on X lifts to the moduli space of all Gieseker stable sheaves on X and we express its fixed point locus explicitly in terms of moduli spaces of pure equivariant sheaves on X. One of the problems arising is to find an equivariant line bundle on the side of the GIT problem, which precisely recovers Gieseker stability. In the case of torsion free equivariant sheaves, we can always construct such equivariant line bundles. As a by-product, we get a combinatorial description of the fixed point locus of the moduli space of mu-stable reflexive sheaves on X. As an application, we show in a sequel Kool (2009) [251 how these methods can be used to compute generating functions of Euler characteristics of moduli spaces of mu-stable torsion free sheaves on nonsingular complete tonic surfaces. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.