Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.

 

Past events in this series


Tue, 17 Feb 2026
15:30
L4

Descendent generating series for Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs on Fano 3-folds

Reginald Anderson
(UC Irvine, California)
Abstract

We adapt Joyce's theory of wall-crossing for enumerative invariants of $\mathbb C$-linear additive categories to Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs on smooth projective Fano 3-folds of "type C or D", and investigate implications for Pandharipande-Thomas generating functions with descendent insertions.

By analyzing the wall-crossing behavior from a stability condition where pairs are unstable to the standard stability condition for PT stable pairs, we derive an explicit formula expressing the PT stable pair invariants $[P_n(X,\beta)]^{virt}$ in terms of sheaf-theoretic invariants $[\mathcal M^{ss}_{(0,0,\beta_i, n_i - \beta_i.c_1/2)}(\tau_-)]_{\rm inv}$ for the moduli space of Gieseker semistable coherent sheaves on $X$ with Chern character $(0,0,\beta_i, n_i - \beta_i.c_1/2)$.

These enumerative invariants are defined as elements in the Lie algebra on the rational Betti homology of the piecewise-linear rigidified higher moduli stack of objects in the bounded derived category of X. Under tensoring by a line bundle, we exhibit a control over the periodicity of sheaf-theoretic invariants with respect to the Euler characteristic $n_i$, which we use to show that the sheaf-theoretic invariants form a quasi-polynomial in $n_i$ of degree $2$ with period given by the divisibility of $\beta_i$ in the lattice $H_2(X,\mathbb Z)/\text{torsion}$.

We use this periodicity in the sheaf-theoretic invariants to show that the descendent generating series for Pandharipande-Thomas stable pairs is the Laurent expansion of a rational function over $\mathbb Q$ in this setting, thus confirming a conjecture due to Pandharipande-Thomas from 2007. Furthermore, we construct a counterexample to a conjecture due to Pandharipande from 2017 on the location of the poles of the descendent generating series, and give a direct proof of a slightly modified conjecture on the location of these poles using wall-crossing techniques.

 

Tue, 10 Mar 2026
15:30
L4

Towards a Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality for symplectic 4-manifolds

Paul Feehan
(Rutgers)
Abstract

The Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality for minimal compact complex surfaces of general type was proved in 1977 independently by Miyaoka, using methods of algebraic geometry, and by Yau, as an outgrowth of his proof of the Calabi conjectures. In this talk, we outline our program to prove the conjecture that symplectic 4-manifolds with $b^+>1$ obey the Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality. Our method uses Morse theory on the gauge theoretic moduli space of non-Abelian monopoles, where the Morse function is a Hamiltonian for a natural circle action and natural two-form.  We shall describe generalizations of Donaldson’s symplectic subspace criterion (1996) from finite to infinite dimensions. These generalized symplectic subspace criteria can be used to show that the natural two-form is non-degenerate and thus an almost symplectic form on the moduli space of non-Abelian monopoles. This talk is based on joint work with Tom Leness and the monographs https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15789  (to appear in AMS Mathematical Surveys and Monographs), https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14710 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13809