Congruences for Taylor expansions of quantum modular forms

Recently, a beautiful paper of Andrews and Sellers has established linear congruences for the Fishburn numbers modulo an infinite set of primes. Since then, a number of authors have proven refined results, for example, extending all of these congruences to arbitrary powers of the primes involved. Here, we take a different perspective and explain the general theory of such congruences in the context of an important class of quantum modular forms. As one example, we obtain an infinite series of combinatorial sequences connected to the "half-derivatives" of the Andrews-Gordon functions and with Kashaev's invariant on $(2m+1,2)$ torus knots, and we prove conditions under which the sequences satisfy linear congruences modulo at least $50\%$ of primes of primes

The Enumeration of Prudent Polygons by Area and its Unusual Asymptotics

Prudent walks are special self-avoiding walks that never take a step towards an already occupied site, and \emph{$k$-sided prudent walks} (with $k=1,2,3,4$) are, in essence, only allowed to grow along $k$ directions. Prudent polygons are prudent walks that return to a point adjacent to their starting point. Prudent walks and polygons have been previously enumerated by length and perimeter (Bousquet-M\'elou, Schwerdtfeger; 2010). We consider the enumeration of \emph{prudent polygons} by \emph{area}. For the 3-sided variety, we find that the generating function is expressed in terms of a $q$-hypergeometric function, with an accumulation of poles towards the dominant singularity. This expression reveals an unusual asymptotic structure of the number of polygons of area $n$, where the critical exponent is the transcendental number $\log_23$ and and the amplitude involves tiny oscillations. Based on numerical data, we also expect similar phenomena to occur for 4-sided polygons. The asymptotic methodology involves an original combination of Mellin transform techniques and singularity analysis, which is of potential interest in a number of other asymptotic enumeration problems.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Jet Schemes of Locally Complete Intersection Canonical Singularities

We prove that if X is a locally complete intersection variety, then X has all the jet schemes irreducible if and only if X has canonical singularities. After embedding X in a smooth variety Y, we use motivic integration to express the condition that X has irreducible jet schemes in terms of data coming from an embedded resolution of X in Y. We show that this condition is equivalent with having canonical singularities. In the appendix, this result is used to prove a generalization of Kostant's freeness theorem to the setting of jet schemes.Comment: With an appendix by David Eisenbud and Edward Frenkel. Final version, to appear in Inventiones Mathematica

Nilpotent bicone and characteristic submodule of a reductive Lie algebra

The nilpotent bicone of a finite dimensional complex reductive Lie algebra g is the subset of elements in g x g whose subspace generated by the components is contained in the nilpotent cone of g. The main result of this note is that the nilpotent bicone is a complete intersection. This affirmatively answers a conjecture of Kraft-Wallach concerning the nullcone. In addition, we introduce and study the characteristic submodule of g. The properties of the nilpotent bicone and the characteristic submodule are known to be very important for the understanding of the commuting variety and its ideal of definition. In order to study the nilpotent bicone, we introduce another subvariety, the principal bicone. The nilpotent bicone, as well as the principal bicone, are linked to jet schemes. We study their dimensions using arguments from motivic integration. Namely, we follow methods developed in http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0008002v5 .Comment: 48 pages. Remark 8 has been modified; one sentence was not correct. We thank Kari Vilonen for pointing out this erro

Bimodule deformations, Picard groups and contravariant connections

We study deformations of invertible bimodules and the behavior of Picard groups under deformation quantization. While K_0-groups are known to be stable under formal deformations of algebras, Picard groups may change drastically. We identify the semiclassical limit of bimodule deformations as contravariant connections and study the associated deformation quantization problem. Our main focus is on formal deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds by star products.Comment: 32 pages. Minor corrections in Sections 5 and 6, typos fixed. Revised version to appear in K-theor