Secant varieties of toric varieties arising from simplicial complexes

Motivated by the study of the secant variety of the Segre-Veronese variety we propose a general framework to analyze properties of the secant varieties of toric embeddings of affine spaces defined by simplicial complexes. We prove that every such secant is toric, which gives a way to use combinatorial tools to study singularities. We focus on the Segre-Veronese variety for which we completely classify their secants that give Gorenstein or Q-Gorenstein varieties. We conclude providing the explicit description of the singular locus. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.