Let $X$ be a Fano manifold. While the properties of the anticanonical divisor $-K_X$ and its multiples have been studied by many authors, the positivity of the tangent bundle $T_X$ is much more elusive. We give a complete characterisation of the pseudoeffectivity of $T_X$ for del Pezzo surfaces, hypersurfaces in the projective space and del Pezzo threefolds.
We propose a conjectural list of Fano manifolds of Picard number $1$ with pseudoeffective normalized tangent bundles, which we prove in various situations by relating it to the complete divisibility conjecture of Russo and Zak on varieties with small codegree. Furthermore, the pseudoeffective thresholds and hence the pseudoeffective cones of the projectivized tangent bundles of rational homogeneous spaces of Picard number $1$ are explicitly determined by studying the total dual VMRT and the geometry of stratified Mukai flops. As a by-product, we obtain sharp vanishing theorems on the global tw…
In this paper we classify rank two Fano bundles $\cE$ on Fano manifolds satisfying $H^2(X,\Z)\cong H^4(X,\Z)\cong\Z$. The classification is obtained via the computation of the nef and pseudoeffective cones of the projectivization ${\mathbb{P}}(\cE)$, that allows us to obtain the cohomological invariants of $X$ and $\cE$. As a by-product we discuss Fano bundles associated to congruences of lines, showing that their varieties of minimal rational tangents may have several linear components.
In this note, we obtain a number of results related to the hard Lefschetz theorem for pseudoeffective line bundles, due to Demailly, Peternell and Schneider. Our first result states that the holomorphic sections produced by the theorem are in fact parallel, when viewed as currents with respect to the singular Chern connection associated with the metric. Our proof is based on a control of the covariant derivative in the approximation process used in the construction of the section. Then we show that we have an isomorphsim between such parallel sections and higher degree cohomology. As an applic…
In this work we deal with vector bundles of rank two on a Fano manifold $X$ with $b_2=b_4=1$. We study the nef and pseudoeffective cones of the corresponding projectivizations and how these cones are related to the decomposability of the vector bundle. As consequences, we obtain the complete list of $\mathbb{P}^1$-bundles over $X$ that have a second $\mathbb{P}^1$-bundle structure, classify all the uniform rank two vector bundles on this class of Fano manifolds and show the stability of indecomposable Fano bundles (with one exception on $\mathbb{P}^2$).
We determine the stability/instability of the tangent bundles of the Fano varieties in a certain class of two orbit varieties, which are classified by Pasquier in 2009. As a consequence, we show that some of these varieties admit unstable tangent bundles, which disproves a conjecture on stability of tangent bundles of Fano manifolds.
In this note we prove that any toric Fano manifold with nef tangent bundle is a product of projective spaces. In particular, it implies that Campana-Peternell conjecture hold for toric manifolds.
In this paper, we classify Fano manifolds with elementary contractions of birational type such that the second or third exterior power of tangent bundles are numerically effective.
In this paper, we classify Fano fourfolds whose the second exterior power of tangent bundles are numerically effective with Picard number greater than one.
We introduce the notion of potentially klt pairs for normal projective varieties with pseudoeffective anticanonical divisor. The potentially non-klt locus is a subset of $X$ which is birationally transformed precisely into the non-klt locus on a $-K_X$-minimal model of $X$. We prove basic properties of potentially non-klt locus in comparison with those of classical non-klt locus. As applications, we give a new characterization of varieties of Fano type, and we also improve results on the rational connectedness of uniruled varieties with pseudoeffective anticanonical divisor.
Let X be a Fano manifold with Picard number one such that the tangent bundle T_X is big. If X admits a rational curve with trivial normal bundle, we show that X is isomorphic to the del Pezzo threefold of degree five.
In this paper we prove that any smooth prime Fano threefold, different from the Mukai-Umemura threefold, contains a 1-dimensional family of intersecting lines. Combined with a result of the second author (see J. Algebr. Geom. 8:2 (1999), 221-244) this implies that any morphism from a smooth Fano threefold of index 2 to a smooth Fano threefold of index 1 must be constant, which gives an answer in dimension 3 to a question stated by Peternell.
We show that deformations of a surjective morphism onto a Fano manifold of Picard number 1 are unobstructed and rigid modulo the automorphisms of the target, if the variety of minimal rational tangents of the Fano manifold is non-linear or finite. The condition on the variety of minimal rational tangents holds for practically all known examples of Fano manifolds of Picard number 1, except the projective space. When the variety of minimal rational tangents is non-linear, the proof is based on an earlier result of N. Mok and the author on the birationality of the tangent map. When the varieties …
A Fano manifold $X$ with nef tangent bundle is of flag-type if it has the same type of elementary contractions as a complete flag manifold. In this paper we present a method to associate a Dynkin diagram $\mathcal{D}(X)$ with any such $X$, based on the numerical properties of its contractions. We then show that $\mathcal{D}(X)$ is the Dynkin diagram of a semisimple Lie group. As an application we prove that Campana-Peternell conjecture holds when $X$ is a flag-type manifold whose Dynkin diagram is $A_n$ ($X$ is shown to be the complete flag in $\mathbb{P}^n$).
This work establishes a structure theorem for compact Kähler manifolds with semipositive anticanonical bundle. Up to finite étale cover, it is proved that such manifolds split holomorphically and isometrically as a product of Ricci flat varieties and of rationally connected manifolds. The proof is based on a characterization of rationally connected manifolds through the non existence of certain twisted contravariant tensor products of the tangent bundle, along with a generalized holonomy principle for pseudoeffective line bundles. A crucial ingredient for this is the characterization of unirul…
By using the classification of Fano 3-folds we prove: Let $X$ be Fano 3-fold. Assume that the tangent bundle $T_X$ of $X$ is not stable (i.e. semi-stable or unstable). Then $b_2\geq 2$ and a relative tangent sheaf $T_{X/Y}$ of a contraction $f:X\longrightarrow Y$ of an extremal face on $X$ is a destabilising subsheaf of $T_X$.
Recently, Kanemitsu has discovered a counterexample to the long-standing conjecture that the tangent bundle of a Fano manifold of Picard number one is (semi)stable. His counterexample is a smooth horospherical variety. There is a weaker conjecture that the tangent bundle of a Fano manifold of Picard number one is simple. We prove that this weaker conjecture is valid for smooth horospherical varieties of Picard number one. Our proof follows from the existence of an irreducible family of unbendable rational curves whose tangent vectors span the tangent spaces of the horospherical variety at gene…
In the present paper we discuss stability of the tanget bundle of a Fano n-fold of index >= n-2 and b_2=1. For example, we prove that all Fano 4-folds with b_2=1 have stable tangent bundle. For this purpose we prove some vanishing theorems for sheaves of twisted holomorphic forms on ample divisors and cyclic coverings of manifolds having "special cohomology".
In characteristic $0$, the Campana-Peternell conjecture claims that the only smooth Fano variety with nef tangent bundle should be homogeneous. In this paper, we study the positive characteristic version of the Campana-Peternell conjecture. In particular, we give an affirmative answer for Fano $4$-folds with nef tangent bundle and Picard number greater than one.
In view of Mori theory, rational homogenous manifolds satisfy a recursive condition: every elementary contraction is a rational homogeneous fibration and the image of any elementary contraction also satisfies the same property. In this paper, we show that a smooth Fano $n$-fold with the same condition and Picard number greater than $n-6$ is either a rational homogeneous manifold or the product of $n-7$ copies of $\mathbb{P}^1$ and a Fano $7$-fold $X_0$ constructed by G. Ottaviani. We also clarify that $X_0$ has non-nef tangent bundle and in particular is not rational homogeneous.
Let $X$ be a nonsingular complex projective toric variety. We address the question of semi-stability as well as stability for the tangent bundle $T{X}$. In particular, a complete answer is given when $X$ is a Fano toric variety of dimension four with Picard number at most two, complementing earlier work of Nakagawa. We also give an infinite set of examples of Fano toric varieties for which $TX$ is unstable; the dimensions of this collection of varieties are unbounded. Our method is based on the equivariant approach initiated by Klyachko and developed further by Perling and Kool.
We investigate the universal cover of projective threefolds whose tangent bundle is a direct sum of subbundles in case the Kodaira dimension is not 1 and 2. We also prove results on Fano manifolds with splitting tangent bundles in any dimension.
We prove two new results on the K-polystability of Q-Fano varieties based on purely algebro-geometric arguments. The first one says that any K-semistable log Fano cone has a special degeneration to a uniquely determined K-polystable log Fano cone. As a corollary, we combine it with the differential-geometric results to complete the proof of Donaldson-Sun's Conjecture which says that the metric tangent cone of any close point appearing on a Gromov-Hausdorff limit of Kahler-Einstein Fano manifolds only depends on the algebraic structure of the singularity. The second result says that for any lo…
It is a well-known fact that families of minimal rational curves on rational homogeneous manifolds of Picard number one are uniform, in the sense that the tangent bundle to the manifold has the same splitting type on each curve of the family. In this note we prove that certain --stronger-- uniformity conditions on a family of minimal rational curves on a Fano manifold of Picard number one allow to prove that the manifold is homogeneous.
In this paper we address Fano manifolds X with a locally unsplit dominating family of rational curves of anticanonical degree equal to the dimension of X. We first observe that their Picard number is at most 3, and then we provide a classification of all cases with maximal Picard number. We also give examples of locally unsplit dominating families of rational curves whose varieties of minimal tangents at a general point is singular.
Let $G$ be a simple algebraic group over the field of complex numbers. Fix a maximal torus $T$ and a Borel subgroup $B$ of $G$ containing $T$. Let $w$ be an element of the Weyl group $W$ of $G$, and let $Z(\tilde w)$ be the Bott-Samelson-Demazure-Hansen (BSDH) variety corresponding to a reduced expression $\tilde w$ of $w$ with respect to the data $(G, B, T)$. In this article we give complete characterization of the expressions $\tilde w$ such that the corresponding BSDH variety $Z(\tilde w)$ is Fano or weak Fano. As a consequence we prove vanishing theorems of the cohomology of tangent bundle…
Let $M$ be a smooth Fano threefold such that a canonical extension of the tangent bundle is an affine manifold. We show that $M$ is rational homogeneous.
Let $X$ be a projective variety and let $C$ be a rational normal curve on $X$. We compute the normal bundle of $C$ in a general complete intersection of hypersurfaces of sufficiently large degree in $X$. As a result, we establish the separable rational connectedness of a large class of varieties, including general Fano complete intersections of hypersurfaces of degree at least three in flag varieties, in arbitrary characteristic. In addition, we give a new way of computing the normal bundle of certain rational curves in products of varieties in terms of their restricted tangent bundles and nor…
Let $X$ be a smooth projective variety defined over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic $p$ whose tangent bundle is nef. We prove that $X$ admits a smooth morphism $X \to M$ such that the fibers are Fano varieties with nef tangent bundle and $T_M$ is numerically flat. We also prove that extremal contractions exist as smooth morphisms. As an application, we prove that, if the Frobenius morphism can be lifted modulo $p^2$, then $X$ admits, up to a finite étale Galois cover, a smooth morphism onto an ordinary abelian variety whose fibers are products of projective spaces.
In a series of two articles Kebekus studied deformation theory of minimal rational curves on contact Fano manifolds. Such curves are called contact lines. Kebekus proved that a contact line through a general point is necessarily smooth and has a fixed standard splitting type of the restricted tangent bundle. In this paper we study singular contact lines and those with special splitting type. We provide restrictions on the families of such lines, and on contact Fano manifolds which have reducible varieties of minimal rational tangents. We also show that the results about singular lines naturall…
Let $S$ be a smooth projective variety and $Δ$ a simple normal crossing $\mathbb{Q}$-divisor with coefficients in $(0,1]$. For any ample $\mathbb{Q}$-line bundle $L$ over $S$, we denote by $\mathscr{E}(L)$ the extension sheaf of the orbifold tangent sheaf $T_S(-\log(Δ))$ by the structure sheaf $\mathcal{O}_S$ with the extension class $c_1(L)$. We show the following two results: (i) If $-(K_S+Δ)$ is ample and $(S, Δ)$ is K-semistable, then for any $λ\in \mathbb{Q}_{>0}$, the extension sheaf $\mathscr{E}({λc_1(-(K_S+Δ))})$ is slope semistable with respect to $-(K_S+Δ)$; (ii) If $K_S+Δ\equiv 0$, …
Suppose that $X$ is a smooth projective variety and that $C$ is a general member of a family of free rational curves on $X$. We prove several statements showing that the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of $T_{X}|_{C}$ is approximately the same as the restriction of the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of $T_{X}$ with respect to the class of $C$. When $X$ is a Fano variety, we prove that the set of all restricted tangent bundles for general free rational curves is controlled by a finite set of data. We then apply our work to analyze Peyre's "freeness" formulation of Manin's Conjecture in the setting o…
In this paper we study the geometry of toric degeneration of a Bott-Samelson-Demazure-Hansen (BSDH) variety. We give some applications to BSDH varieties. Precisely, we classify Fano, weak Fano and log Fano BSDH varieties and their toric limits in Kac-Moody setting. We prove some vanishing theorems for the cohomology of tangent bundle (and line bundles) on BSDH varieties. We also recover the results in arXiv:1604.01998, by toric methods.
We exhibit the first non-trivial concrete examples of Gromov-Hausdorff compactifications of moduli spaces of Kähler-Einstein Fano manifolds in all complex dimensions bigger than two (Fano K-moduli spaces). We also discuss potential applications to explicit study of moduli spaces of K-stable Fano manifolds with large anti-canonical volume. Our arguments are based on recent progress about the geometry of metric tangent cones and on related ideas about the algebro-geometric study of singularities of K-stable Fano varieties.
We consider normal projective n-dimensional varieties X whose anticanonical divisor class -K is ample and where every Weil divisor is a rational multiple of K. The index i is the largest integer such that K/i exists as a Weil divisor. We show (i) if X has log-terminal singularities, and in addition 1-forms on the smooth part of X are holomorphic on a resolution, then (-K)^n =< (max(in,n+1))^n; (ii) if the tangent sheaf of X is semistable, then (-K)^n =<(2n)^n. The proof is based on some elementary but possibly surprising slope estimates on sheaves of differential operators on plurianticanonica…
Let $X$ be a $\mathbb Q$-Fano variety admitting a Kähler-Einstein metric. We prove that up to a finite quasi-étale cover, $X$ splits isometrically as a product of Kähler-Einstein $\mathbb Q$-Fano varieties whose tangent sheaf is stable with respect to the anticanonical polarization. This relies among other things on a very general splitting theorem for algebraically integrable foliations. We also prove that the canonical extension of $T_X$ by $\mathscr O_X$ is semistable with respect to the anticanonical polarization.
A Bott tower of height $r$ is a sequence of projective bundles $$X_r \overset{π_r}\longrightarrow X_{r-1} \overset{π_{r-1}}\longrightarrow \cdots \overset{π_2}\longrightarrow X_1=\mathbb P^1 \overset{π_1} \longrightarrow X_0=\{pt\}, $$ where $X_i=\mathbb P (\mathcal O_{X_{i-1}}\oplus \mathcal L_{i-1})$ for a line bundle $\mathcal L_{i-1}$ over $X_{i-1}$ for all $1\leq i\leq r$ and $\mathbb P(-)$ denotes the projectivization. These are smooth projective toric varieties and we refer to the top object $X_{r}$ also as a Bott tower. In this article, we study the Mori cone and numerically effective …
In this paper, we prove that the tangent bundle of the moduli space $\cSU_C(r,d)$ of stable bundles of rank $r>2$ and of fixed determinant of degree $d$ (such that $(r,d)=1$), on a smooth projective curve $C$ is always stable, in the sense of Mumford-Takemoto. This verifies a well-known conjecture, and is related to a conjectural existence of a Kähler-Einstein metric on Fano varieties with Picard number one.
We consider the question of simplicity of a ring $R$ under the action of its ring of differential operators $D_R$. We give examples to show that even when $R$ is Gorenstein and has rational singularities $R$ need not be a simple $D_R$-module; for example, this is the case when $R$ is the homogeneous coordinate ring of a smooth cubic surface. Our examples are homogeneous coordinate rings of smooth Fano varieties, and our proof proceeds by showing that the tangent bundle of such a variety need not be big. We also give a partial converse showing that when $R$ is the homogeneous coordinate ring of…
Let $X$ be a smooth complex projective variety with nef $\bigwedge^2 T_X$ and $\dim X \geq 3$. We prove that, up to a finite étale cover $\tilde{X} \to X$, the Albanese map $\tilde{X} \to {\rm Alb}(\tilde{X})$ is a locally trivial fibration whose fibers are isomorphic to a smooth Fano variety $F$ with nef $\bigwedge^2 T_F$. As a bi-product, we see that either $T_X$ is nef or $X$ is a Fano variety. Moreover we study a contraction of a $K_X$-negative extremal ray $φ: X \to Y$. In particular, we prove that $X$ is isomorphic to the blow-up of a projective space at a point if $φ$ is of birational t…
Chains of minimal degree rational curves have been used as an important tool in the study of Fano manifolds. Their own geometric properties, however, have not been studied much. The goal of the paper is to introduce an infinitesimal method to study chains of minimal rational curves via varieties of minimal rational tangents and their higher secants. For many examples of Fano manifolds this method can be used to compute the minimal length of chains needed to join two general points. One consequence of our computation is a bound on the multiplicities of divisors at a general point of the moduli …
Let $X$ be a complex smooth projective variety such that the exterior power of the tangent bundle $\bigwedge^{r} T_X$ is nef for some $1\leq r<\dim X$. We prove that, up to an étale cover, $X$ is a Fano fiber space over an Abelian variety. This gives generalizations of the structure theorem of varieties with nef tangent bundle by Demailly, Peternell and Schneider and that of varieties with nef $\bigwedge^{2} T_X$ by the author. Our result also gives an answer to a question raised by Li, Ou and Yang for varieties with strictly nef $\bigwedge^{r} T_X$ when $r < \dim X$.
Complex contact manifolds arise naturally in differential geometry, algebraic geometry and exterior differential systems. Their classification would answer an important question about holonomy groups. The geometry of such manifold $X$ is governed by the contact lines contained in $X$. These are related to the notion of a variety of minimal rational tangents. In this review we discuss the partial classification theorems of projective complex contact manifolds. Among such manifolds one finds contact Fano manifolds (which include adjoint varieties) and projectivised cotangent bundles. In the firs…