We discuss topics on the geometry of the moduli space of curves. We present a short proof of the Harris-Mumford theorem on the Kodaira dimension of the moduli space which replaces the computations on the stack of admissible covers by a simple study of tautological Koszul bundles on M_g. We also present a streamlined self-contained account of Verra's recent work on the unirationality of M_g. Finally, we discuss a proof that the moduli space of curves of genus 22 is of general type. Written for Surveys in Differential Geometry.
We develop the formalism of universal torsors in equivariant birational geometry and apply it to produce new examples of nonbirational but stably birational actions of finite groups.
We discuss the equivariant Burnside group and related new invariants in equivariant birational geometry, with a special emphasis on applications in low dimensions.
Inspired by the Weak Lefschetz Principle, we study when a smooth projective variety fully determines the birational geometry of some of its subvarieties. In particular, we consider the natural embedding of the space of complete quadrics into the space of complete collineations and we observe that their birational geometry, from the point of view of Mori theory, fully determines each other. When two varieties are related in this way, we call them birational twins. We explore this notion and its various flavors for other embeddings between Mori dream spaces.
This is a report on some of the main developments in birational geometry in the last few years focusing on the minimal model program, Fano varieties, singularities and related topics, in characteristic zero.
Here we investigate the birational geometry of projective varieties of arbitrary dimension having defective higher secant varieties. We apply the classical tool of tangential projections and we determine natural conditions for uniruledness, rational connectivity, and rationality.
This article contains the notes of a graduate course on birational geometry focusing on the minimal model program. Topics covered include singularities, vanishing, nonvanishing, cone and contraction, base point freeness, finite generation, flips, termination, minimal models and Mori fibre spaces.
Varieties of Sums of Powers describe the additive decompositions of an homogeneous polynomial into powers of linear forms. Despite their long history, going back to Sylvester and Hilbert, few of them are known for special degrees and number of variables. In this paper we aim to understand a general birational behaviour of VSP, if any. To do this we birationally embed these varieties into Grassmannians and prove the rationality, unirationality or rational connectedness of many of those in arbitrary degrees and number of variables.
We determine the birational geometry of O'Grady's six dimensional example over the Donaldson-Uhlenbeck compactification, by looking at the locus of non-locally-free sheaves on the relevant moduli space.
We study birational geometry of the moduli space of stable sheaves on a quadric surface with Hilbert polynomial $5m + 1$ and $c_{1} = (2, 3)$. We describe a birational map between the moduli space and a projective bundle over a Grassmannian as a composition of smooth blow-ups/downs.
We study the motivic Grothendieck group of algebraic varieties from the point of view of stable birational geometry. In particular, we obtain a counter-example to a conjecture of M. Kapranov on the rationality of motivic zeta-function.
In this paper we analyse the birational geometry of O'Grady ten dimensional manifolds, giving a characterisation of Kaehler classes and lagrangian fibrations. Moreover, we study symplectic compactifications of intermediate jacobian fibrations of smooth cubic fourfolds.
Via wall-crossing, we study the birational geometry of Beauville-Mukai systems on K3 surfaces with Picard rank one. We show that there is a class of walls which are always present in the movable cones of Beauville-Mukai systems. We give a complete description of the birational geometry of rank two Beauville-Mukai systems when the genus of the surface is small.
This is, mostly, a survey of results about the birational geometry of rationally connected manifolds, using rational curves analogous to lines in ${\mathbb P}^n$ ({\it quasi-lines}). Various characterizations of a Zariski neighbourhood of a line in ${\mathbb P}^n$ are obtained, some of them being new. Also, methods of formal geometry are applied for deducing results of birational nature.
This paper is based on a talk at a conference "JDG 2017: Conference on Geometry and Topology". We survey recent progress on the DK hypothesis connecting the birational geometry and the derived categories stating that the K-equivalence of smooth projective varieties should correspond to the equivalence of their derived categories, and the K-inequality to the fully faithful embedding.
We describe a close relation between wall crossings in the birational geometry of moduli space of Gieseker stable sheaves $M_H(v)$ on $\bb{P}^2$ and mini-wall crossings in the stability manifold $Stab(D^b(\bb{P}^2))$.
In this note we introduce generalised pairs from the perspective of the evolution of the notion of space in birational algebraic geometry. We describe some applications of generalised pairs in recent years and then mention a few open problems.
In this paper we prove that there are exactly two $G$-minimal surfaces which are $G$-birational to the quintic del Pezzo surface, where $G \cong C_5 \rtimes C_4$. These surfaces are the quintic del Pezzo surface itself and the surface $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$.
We study birational geometry of Fano varieties, realized as double covers $σ\colon V\to {\mathbb P}^M$, $M\geq 5$, branched over generic hypersurfaces $W=W_{2(M-1)}$ of degree $2(M-1)$. We prove that the only structures of a rationally connected fiber space on $V$ are the pencils-subsystems of the free linear system $|-\frac12 K_V|$. The groups of birational and biregular self-maps of the variety $V$ coincide.
This is a survey for the 2015 AMS Summer Institute on Algebraic Geometry about the Frobenius type techniques recently used extensively in positive characteristic algebraic geometry. We first explain the basic ideas through simple versions of the fundamental definitions and statements, and then we survey most of the recent algebraic geometry results obtained using these techniques.
The paper explores the birational geometry of terminal quartic 3-folds. In doing this I develop a new approach to study maximal singularities with positive dimensional centers. This allows to determine the pliability of a Q-factorial quartic with ordinary double points, and it shows the importance of Q-factoriality in the context of birational geometry of uniruled 3-folds
We investigate the birational geometry (in the sense of Mori's program) of the moduli space of rank 2 semistable parabolic vector bundles on a rational curve. We compute the effective cone of the moduli space and show that all birational models obtained by Mori's program are also moduli spaces of parabolic vector bundles with certain parabolic weights.
There is two group actions on the Fano scheme of lines such that the quotient becomes an irreducible symplectic manifold. We showed that both quotients are birational to the generalized Kummer variety or the 2-points Hilbert scheme of a K3 surface.
Extending work of Meinhardt and Partsch, we prove that two varieties are isomorphic in codimension c if and only if certain quotients of their categories of coherent sheaves are equivalent. This result interpolates between Gabriel's reconstruction theorem and the fact that two varieties are birational if and only if they have the same function field.
The notion of d-critical loci was introduced by Joyce in order to give classical shadows of $(-1)$-shifted symplectic derived schemes. In this paper, we discuss birational geometry for d-critical loci, by introducing notions such as `d-critical flips', `d-critical flops', etc. They are not birational maps of the underlying spaces, but rather should be understood as virtual birational maps. We show that several wall-crossing phenomena of moduli spaces of stable objects on Calabi-Yau 3-folds are described in terms of d-critical birational geometry. Among them, we show that wall-crossing diagrams…
We survey some results on the nonrationality and birational rigidity of certain hypersurfaces of Fano type. The focus is on hypersurfaces of Fano index one, but hypersurfaces of higher index are also discussed.
Few explicit families of 3-folds are known for which the computation of the canonical ring is accessible and the birational geometry non-trivial. In this note we investigate a family of determinantal 3-folds in $\mathbb P^2 \times \mathbb P^3$ where this is the case.
Lecture notes of a course on birational geometry (taught at College de France, Winter 2011, with the support of Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris). Topics covered: introduction into the subject, contractions and extremal rays, pairs and singularities, Kodaira dimension, minimal model program, cone and contraction, vanishing, base point freeness, flips and local finite generation, pl flips and extension theorems, existence of minimal models and Mori fibre spaces, global finite generation, etc.
This is the unabridged web version of the paper that will be published on the American Journal of Mathematics. In this paper, we study the birational geometry of certain examples of mildly singular quartic 3-folds. A quartic 3-fold is an example of a Fano variety, that is, a variety $X$ with ample anticanonical sheaf $Ø_X(-K_X)$. From the point of view of birational geometry they basically fall within two classes: either $X$ is ``close to being rational'', and then it has very many biregularly distinct birational models as a Fano 3-fold, or, at the other extreme, $X$ has a unique model and it …
We give a survey of joint work with Mircea Mustaţă and Chenyang Xu on the connections between the geometry of Berkovich spaces over the field of Laurent series and the birational geometry of one-parameter degenerations of smooth projective varieties. The central objects in our theory are the weight function and the essential skeleton of the degeneration. We tried to keep the text self-contained, so that it can serve as an introduction to Berkovich geometry for birational geometers.
We study the geography and birational geometry of 3-fold conic bundles over P^2 and cubic del Pezzo fibrations over P^1. We discuss many explicit examples and raise several open questions. This paper was submitted to the proceedings of the "Fano conference" held in Torino in October 2002.
The classification of minimal rational surfaces and the birational links between them by Iskovskikh, Manin and others is a well-known subject in the theory of algebraic surfaces. We explain algorithms that realise links of type II between minimal del Pezzo surfaces, one of the major classes of birational links, and we describe briefly how this fits into a large project to implement the results of Iskovskikh's programme in Magma.
We study the birational geometry of varieties of maximal Albanese dimension. In particular we discuss criteria for a generically finite morphism of varieties of maximal Albanese dimension to be birational; we give a new characterization of Theta divisors; we study the Albanese map and refine some of the results of Kollár; finally we use these results to birationally classify varieties with $P_3(X)=2$ and $q(X)=dim (X)$. Our method combines the generic vanishing theorems of Green and Lazarsfeld, the theory of Fourier Mukai transforms and the results of Kollàr on higher direct images of dualizin…
We show that the minimal model program on any smooth projective surface is realized as a variation of the moduli spaces of Bridgeland stable objects in the derived category of coherent sheaves.
For a minimal $3$-fold $X$ with $K_X\equiv 0$ and a nef and big Weil divisor $L$ on $X$, we investigate the birational geometry inspired by $L$. We prove that $|mL|$ and $|K_X+mL|$ give birational maps for all $m\geq 17$. The result remains true under weaker assumption that $L$ is big and has no stable base components.
Using the techniques of Bayer--Macrì, we determine the walls in the movable cone of the Mukai system of rank two for a general K3 surface $S$ of genus two. We study the (essentially unique) birational map to $S^{[5]}$ and decompose it into a sequence of flops. We give an interpretation of the exceptional loci in terms of Brill--Noether loci.
We prove the conjecture that two projective symplectic resolutions for a symplectic variety $W$ are related by Mukai's elementary transformations over $W$ in codimension 2 in the following cases: (i). nilpotent orbit closures in a classical simple complex Lie algebra; (ii). some quotient symplectic varieties.
We announce a factorization result for equivariant birational morphisms between toric 4-folds whose source is Fano: such a morphism is always a composite of blow-ups along smooth invariant centers. Moreover, we show with a counterexample that, differently from the 3-dimensional case, even if both source and target are Fano, the intermediate varieties can not be chosen Fano.
It is well known that numerical quantities arising from the theory of D-modules are related to invariants of singularities in birational geometry. This paper surveys a deeper relationship between the two areas, where the numerical connections are enhanced to sheaf theoretic constructions facilitated by the theory of mixed Hodge modules. The emphasis is placed on the recent theory of Hodge ideals.
We give a variant of the Beauville--Narasimhan--Ramanan correspondence for irregular parabolic Higgs bundles with semi-simple irregular part and show that it defines a Poisson isomorphism between certain irregular Dolbeault moduli spaces of a curve and relative Picard bundles of families of ruled surfaces over a curve.
Bernardi and Tirabassi show the existence of full strong exceptional collections consisting of line bundles on smooth toric Fano $3$-folds under assuming Bondal's conjecture, which states that the Frobenius push-forward of the structure sheaf $\mc O_X$ generates the derived category $D^b(X)$ for smooth projective toric varieties $X$. In this article, we show Bondal's conjecture for smooth toric Fano $3$-folds and also improve their result, using birational geometry.
