We give examples of complex hyperplane arrangements for which the top characteristic variety contains positive-dimensional irreducible components that do not pass through the origin of the character torus. These examples answer several questions of Libgober and Yuzvinsky. As an application, we exhibit a pair of arrangements for which the resonance varieties of the Orlik-Solomon algebra are (abstractly) isomorphic, yet whose characteristic varieties are not isomorphic. The difference comes from translated components, which are not detected by the tangent cone at the origin.
These lecture notes are based on lectures given by the author at the summer school "Arrangements in Pyrénées" in June 2012. We survey and compare various compactifications of complex hyperplane arrangement complements. In particular, we review the Gel'fand-MacPherson construction, Kapranov's visible contours compactification, and De Concini and Procesi's wonderful compactification. We explain how these constructions are unified by some ideas from the modern origins of tropical geometry. The paper contains a few new arguments intended to make the presentation as self-contained as possible.
We consider a weighted family of $n$ generic parallelly translated hyperplanes in $\C^k$ and describe the characteristic variety of the Gauss-Manin differential equations for associated hypergeometric integrals. The characteristic variety is given as the zero set of Laurent polynomials, whose coefficients are determined by weights and the Plucker coordinates of the associated point in the Grassmannian Gr(k,n). The Laurent polynomials are in involution.
We investigate toric varieties defined by arrangements of hyperplanes and call them strongly symmetric. The smoothness of such a toric variety translates to the fact that the arrangement is crystallographic. As a result, we obtain a complete classification of this class of toric varieties. Further, we show that these varieties are projective and describe associated toric arrangements in these varieties.
Motivated by some computations of Feynman integrals and certain conjectures on mixed Tate motives, Bejleri and Marcolli posed questions about the $\mathbb{F}_1$-structure (in the sense of torification) on the complement of a hyperplane arrangement, especially for an arrangement defined in the space of cycles of a graph. In this paper, we prove that an arrangement has an $\mathbb{F}_1$-structure if and only if it is Boolean. We also prove that the arrangement in the cycle space of a graph is Boolean if and only if the cycle space has a basis consisting of cycles such that any two of them do not…
An enumerative problem on a variety $V$ is usually solved by reduction to intersection theory in the cohomology of a compactification of $V$. However, if the problem is invariant under a "nice" group action on $V$ (so that $V$ is spherical), then many authors suggested a better home for intersection theory: the direct limit of the cohomology rings of all equivariant compactifications of $V$. We call this limit the affine cohomology of $V$ and construct affine characteristic classes of subvarieties of a complex torus, taking values in the affine cohomology of the torus. This allows us to make t…
The regular \Z^r-covers of a finite cell complex X are parameterized by the Grassmannian of r-planes in H^1(X,\Q). Moving about this variety, and recording when the Betti numbers b_1,..., b_i of the corresponding covers are finite carves out certain subsets Ω^i_r(X) of the Grassmannian. We present here a method, essentially going back to Dwyer and Fried, for computing these sets in terms of the jump loci for homology with coefficients in rank 1 local systems on X. Using the exponential tangent cones to these jump loci, we show that each Ω-invariant is contained in the complement of a union of …
Real Legendrian subvarieties are classical objects of differential geometry and classical mechanics and they have been studied since antiquity. However, complex Legendrian subvarieties are much more rigid and have more exceptional properties. The most remarkable case is the Legendrian subvarieties of projective space and prior to the author's research only few smooth examples of these were known. The first series of results of this thesis is related to the automorphism group of any Legendrian subvariety in any projective contact manifold. The connected component of this group (under suitable m…
