Birational Geometry And Moduli Spaces

This volume collects contributions from speakers at the INdAM Workshop “Birational Geometry and Moduli Spaces”, which was held in Rome on 11–15 June 2018. The workshop was devoted to the interplay between birational geometry and moduli spaces and the contributions of the volume reflect the same idea, focusing on both these areas and their interaction. In particular, the book includes both surveys and original papers on irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds, Severi varieties, degenerations of Calabi-Yau varieties, uniruled threefolds, toric Fano threefolds, mirror symmetry, canonical bundle formula, the Lefschetz principle, birational transformations, and deformations of diagrams of algebras. The intention is to disseminate the knowledge of advanced results and key techniques used to solve open problems. The book is intended for all advanced graduate students and researchers interested in the new research frontiers of birational geometry and moduli spaces.

The proceedings from the Abel Symposium on Geometry of Moduli, held at Svinøya Rorbuer, Svolvær in Lofoten, in August 2017, present both survey and research articles on the recent surge of developments in understanding moduli problems in algebraic geometry. Written by many of the main contributors to this evolving subject, the book provides a comprehensive collection of new methods and the various directions in which moduli theory is advancing. These include the geometry of moduli spaces, non-reductive geometric invariant theory, birational geometry, enumerative geometry, hyper-kähler geometry, syzygies of curves and Brill-Noether theory and stability conditions. Moduli theory is ubiquitous in algebraic geometry, and this is reflected in the list of moduli spaces addressed in this volume: sheaves on varieties, symmetric tensors, abelian differentials, (log) Calabi-Yau varieties, points on schemes, rational varieties, curves, abelian varieties and hyper-Kähler manifolds.

This edition has been updated to reflect recent advances in the theory of semistable coherent sheaves and their moduli spaces. The authors review changes in the field and point the reader towards further literature. An ideal text for graduate students or mathematicians with a background in algebraic geometry.

​​​​This book features recent developments in a rapidly growing area at the interface of higher-dimensional birational geometry and arithmetic geometry. It focuses on the geometry of spaces of rational curves, with an emphasis on applications to arithmetic questions. Classically, arithmetic is the study of rational or integral solutions of diophantine equations and geometry is the study of lines and conics. From the modern standpoint, arithmetic is the study of rational and integral points on algebraic varieties over nonclosed fields. A major insight of the 20th century was that arithmetic properties of an algebraic variety are tightly linked to the geometry of rational curves on the variety and how they vary in families. This collection of solicited survey and research papers is intended to serve as an introduction for graduate students and researchers interested in entering the field, and as a source of reference for experts working on related problems. Topics that will be addressed include: birational properties such as rationality, unirationality, and rational connectedness, existence of rational curves in prescribed homology classes, cones of rational curves on rationally connected and Calabi-Yau varieties, as well as related questions within the framework of the Minimal Model Program.

This book is based on lectures given at the Graduate Summer School of the 2015 Park City Mathematics Institute program “Geometry of moduli spaces and representation theory”, and is devoted to several interrelated topics in algebraic geometry, topology of algebraic varieties, and representation theory. Geometric representation theory is a young but fast developing research area at the intersection of these subjects. An early profound achievement was the famous conjecture by Kazhdan–Lusztig about characters of highest weight modules over a complex semi-simple Lie algebra, and its subsequent proof by Beilinson-Bernstein and Brylinski-Kashiwara. Two remarkable features of this proof have inspired much of subsequent development: intricate algebraic data turned out to be encoded in topological invariants of singular geometric spaces, while proving this fact required deep general theorems from algebraic geometry. Another focus of the program was enumerative algebraic geometry. Recent progress showed the role of Lie theoretic structures in problems such as calculation of quantum cohomology, K-theory, etc. Although the motivation and technical background of these constructions is quite different from that of geometric Langlands duality, both theories deal with topological invariants of moduli spaces of maps from a target of complex dimension one. Thus they are at least heuristically related, while several recent works indicate possible strong technical connections. The main goal of this collection of notes is to provide young researchers and experts alike with an introduction to these areas of active research and promote interaction between the two related directions.

This lecture notes volume presents significant contributions from the “Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory” Summer School, held at Galatasaray University, Istanbul, June 2-13, 2014. It addresses subjects ranging from Arakelov geometry and Iwasawa theory to classical projective geometry, birational geometry and equivariant cohomology. Its main aim is to introduce these contemporary research topics to graduate students who plan to specialize in the area of algebraic geometry and/or number theory. All contributions combine main concepts and techniques with motivating examples and illustrative problems for the covered subjects. Naturally, the book will also be of interest to researchers working in algebraic geometry, number theory and related fields.

Originating from the School on Birational Geometry of Hypersurfaces, this volume focuses on the notion of (stable) rationality of projective varieties and, more specifically, hypersurfaces in projective spaces, and provides a large number of open questions, techniques and spectacular results. The aim of the school was to shed light on this vast area of research by concentrating on two main aspects: (1) Approaches focusing on (stable) rationality using deformation theory and Chow-theoretic tools like decomposition of the diagonal; (2) The connection between K3 surfaces, hyperkähler geometry and cubic fourfolds, which has both a Hodge-theoretic and a homological side. Featuring the beautiful lectures given at the school by Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène, Daniel Huybrechts, Emanuele Macrì, and Claire Voisin, the volume also includes additional notes by János Kollár and an appendix by Andreas Hochenegger.

The main focus of this volume is on the problem of describing the automorphism groups of affine and projective varieties, a classical subject in algebraic geometry where, in both cases, the automorphism group is often infinite dimensional. The collection covers a wide range of topics and is intended for researchers in the fields of classical algebraic geometry and birational geometry (Cremona groups) as well as affine geometry with an emphasis on algebraic group actions and automorphism groups. It presents original research and surveys and provides a valuable overview of the current state of the art in these topics. Bringing together specialists from projective, birational algebraic geometry and affine and complex algebraic geometry, including Mori theory and algebraic group actions, this book is the result of ensuing talks and discussions from the conference “Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry” held in October 2012, at the CIRM, Levico Terme, Italy. The talks at the conference highlighted the close connections between the above-mentioned areas and promoted the exchange of knowledge and methods from adjacent fields.