Linear Toric Fibrations

These notes are based on three lectures given at the 2013 CIME/CIRM summer school. The purpose of this series of lectures is to introduce the notion of a toric fibration and to give its geometrical and combinatorial characterizations. Polarized toric varieties which are birationally equivalent to projective toric bundles are associated to a class of polytopes called Cayley polytopes. Their geometry and combinatorics have a fruitful interplay leading to fundamental insight in both directions. These notes will illustrate geometrical phenomena, in algebraic geometry and neighboring fields, which are characterized by a Cayley structure. Examples are projective duality of toric varieties and polyhedral adjunction theory

Self-dual projective toric varieties

Let T be a torus over an algebraically closed field k of characteristic 0, and consider a projective T-module P(V). We determine when a projective toric subvariety X of P(V) is self-dual, in terms of the configuration of weights of V.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure. Minor change

Describing codimension two defects

Codimension two defects of the $(0,2)$ six dimensional theory $\mathscr{X}[\mathfrak{j}]$ have played an important role in the understanding of dualities for certain $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs in four dimensions. These defects are typically understood by their behaviour under various dimensional reduction schemes. In their various guises, the defects admit partial descriptions in terms of singularities of Hitchin systems, Nahm boundary conditions or Toda operators. Here, a uniform dictionary between these descriptions is given for a large class of such defects in $\mathscr{X}[\mathfrak{j}], \mathfrak{j} \in A,D,E$.Comment: 74pp, lots of tables detailing order reversing duality; (v2) Acknowledgement added. Notation simplified, refs added, minor fixes ; (v3) Minor changes, version accepted in JHEP. I thank the referee for helpful comments towards improving presentatio

On linear series with negative Brill-Noether number

Brill-Noether theory studies the existence and deformations of curves in projective spaces; its basic object of study is $\mathcal{W}^r_{d,g}$, the moduli space of smooth genus $g$ curves with a choice of degree $d$ line bundle having at least $(r+1)$ independent global sections. The Brill-Noether theorem asserts that the map $\mathcal{W}^r_{d,g} \rightarrow \mathcal{M}_g$ is surjective with general fiber dimension given by the number $\rho = g - (r+1)(g-d+r)$, under the hypothesis that $0 \leq \rho \leq g$. One may naturally conjecture that for $\rho < 0$, this map is generically finite onto a subvariety of codimension $-\rho$ in $\mathcal{M}_g$. This conjecture fails in general, but seemingly only when $-\rho$ is large compared to $g$. This paper proves that this conjecture does hold for at least one irreducible component of $\mathcal{W}^r_{d,g}$, under the hypothesis that $0 < -\rho \leq \frac{r}{r+2} g - 3r+3$. We conjecture that this result should hold for all $0 < -\rho \leq g + C$ for some constant $C$, and we give a purely combinatorial conjecture that would imply this stronger result.Comment: 16 page

Immersed surfaces in the modular orbifold

A hyperbolic conjugacy class in the modular group PSL(2,Z) corresponds to a closed geodesic in the modular orbifold. Some of these geodesics virtually bound immersed surfaces, and some do not; the distinction is related to the polyhedral structure in the unit ball of the stable commutator length norm. We prove the following stability theorem: for every hyperbolic element of the modular group, the product of this element with a sufficiently large power of a parabolic element is represented by a geodesic that virtually bounds an immersed surface.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures; version 2 contains minor correction

Koszul algebras and regularity

This is a survey paper on commutative Koszul algebras and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity. We describe several techniques to establish the Koszulness of algebras. We discuss variants of the Koszul property such as strongly Koszul, absolutely Koszul and universally Koszul. We present several open problems related with these notions and their local variants

On the cycle class map for zero-cycles over local fields

We study the Chow group of zero-cycles of smooth projective varieties over local and strictly local fields. We prove in particular the injectivity of the cycle class map to integral l-adic cohomology for a large class of surfaces with positive geometric genus, over local fields of residue characteristic different from l. The same statement holds for semistable K3 surfaces defined over C((t)), but does not hold in general for surfaces over strictly local fields.Comment: 37 pages (with an appendix by Spencer Bloch); bibliography updated, final versio