Geometry and Analysis Seminar

Grothendieck's Quot schemes — moduli spaces of quotient sheaves — are fundamental objects in algebraic geometry, but we know very little about them. This talk will focus on a relatively simple special case: the Quot scheme Quotˡ(E) of length l quotients of a vector bundle E of rank r on a smooth surface S. The scheme Quotˡ(E) is a cross of the Hilbert scheme of points of S (E=O) and the projectivisation of E (l=1); it carries a virtual fundamental class, and if l and r are at least 2, then Quotˡ(E) is singular. I will explain how the ADHM description of Quotˡ(E) provides a conjectural description of the singularities, and show how they can be resolved in the l=2 case. Furthermore, I will describe the relation between Quotˡ(E) and Quotˡ of a quotient of E, prove a functoriality result for the virtual fundamental class, and use it to compute certain tautological integrals over Quotˡ(E).

The torus T of projective space also acts on the Hilbert
scheme of subschemes of projective space, and the T-graph of the
Hilbert scheme has vertices the fixed points of this action, and edges
the closures of one-dimensional orbits. In general this graph depends
on the underlying field. I will discuss joint work with Rob
Silversmith, in which we construct of a subgraph, which we call the
spine, of the T-graph of Hilb^N(A^2) that is independent of the choice
of field. The key technique is an understanding of the tropical ideal,
in the sense of tropical scheme theory, of the ideal of the universal
family of an edge in the spine.

We prove a homological mirror symmetry result for a one-parameter family of genus 2 curves (https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04227), and then mention current joint work with H. Azam, H. Lee, and C.-C. M. Liu on generalizing this to the 6-parameter family of all genus 2 curves.

First we describe the B-model genus 2 curve in a 4-torus and the geometric construction of the generalized SYZ mirror. Then we set up the Fukaya-Seidel category on the mirror. Finally we will see the main algebraic HMS result on homogenous coordinate rings, which is at the level of cohomology. The method involves first considering mirror symmetry for the 4-torus, then restricting to the hypersurface genus 2 curve and extending to a mirror Landau-Ginzburg model with fiber the mirror 4-torus. 

Unlike for closed manifolds, the existence of positive scalar curvature (psc) metrics on connected manifolds with
nonempty boundary is unobstructed. We study and compare the spaces of psc metrics on such manifolds with various
conditions along the boundary: H ≥ 0, H = 0, H > 0, II = 0, doubling, product structure. Here H stands for the
mean curvature of the boundary and II for its second fundamental form. "Doubling" means that the doubled metric
on the doubled manifold (along the boundary) is smooth and "product structure" means that near the boundary the
metric has product form. We show that many, but not all of the obvious inclusions are weak homotopy equivalences.
In particular, we will see that if the manifold carries a psc metric with H ≥ 0, then it also carries one which is
doubling but not necessarily one which has product structure. This is joint work with Bernhard Hanke.

The idea of assigning weights to local coordinate functions is used in many areas of mathematics, such as singularity theory, microlocal analysis, sub-Riemannian geometry, or the theory of hypo-elliptic operators, under various terminologies. In this talk, I will describe some differential-geometric aspects of weightings along submanifolds. This includes a coordinate-free definition, and the construction of weighted normal bundles and weighted blow-ups. As an application, I will describe a canonical local model for isotropic embeddings in symplectic manifolds. (Based on joint work with Yiannis Loizides.)

In the talk I shall discuss an approach to the localisation technique, for spaces satisfying the curvature-dimension condition, by means of L1-optimal transport. Moreover, I shall present recent work on a generalisation of the technique to multiple constraints setting. Applications of the theory lie in functional and geometric inequalities, e.g. in the Lévy-Gromov isoperimetric inequality.

Geometric complexity theory is an approach towards solving computational complexity lower bounds questions using algebraic geometry and representation theory. This talk contains an introduction to geometric complexity theory and a presentation of some recent results. Along the way connections to the study of secant varieties and to classical combinatorial and representation theoretic conjectures will be pointed out.

The Spin(7) and SU(4) structures on a Calabi-Yau 4-fold give rise to certain first order PDEs defining special Yang-Mills connections: the Spin(7) instanton equations and the Hermitian Yang-Mills (HYM) equations respectively. The latter are stronger than the former. In 1998 C. Lewis proved that -over a compact base space- the existence of an HYM connection implies the converse. In this talk we demonstrate that the equivalence of the two gauge-theoretic problems fails to hold in generality. We do this by studying the invariant solutions on a highly symmetric noncompact Calabi-Yau 4-fold: the Stenzel manifold. We give a complete description of the moduli space of irreducible invariant Spin(7) instantons with structure group SO(3) on this space and find that the HYM connections are properly embedded in it. This moduli space reveals an explicit example of a sequence of Spin(7) instantons bubbling off near a Cayley submanifold. The missing limit is an HYM connection, revealing a potential relationship between the two equation systems.