Morsifications and mutations

We describe and investigate a connection between the topology of isolated singularities of plane curves and the mutation equivalence, in the sense of cluster algebra theory, of the quivers associated with their morsifications.Comment: Major revision and expansion. Several new results. 80 pages, 66 figure

More about vanishing cycles and mutation

The paper continues the discussion of symplectic aspects of Picard-Lefschetz theory begun in "Vanishing cycles and mutation" (this archive). There we explained how to associate to a suitable fibration over a two-dimensional disc a triangulated category, the "derived directed Fukaya category" which describes the structure of the vanishing cycles. The present second part serves two purposes. Firstly, it contains various kinds of algebro-geometric examples, including the "mirror manifold" of the projective plane. Secondly there is a (largely conjectural) discussion of more advanced topics, such as (i) Hochschild cohomology, (ii) relations between Picard-Lefschetz theory and Morse theory, (iii) a proposed "dimensional reduction" algorithm for doing certain Floer cohomology computations.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX2e, 9 eps figure

Singular curves and quasi-hereditary algebras

In this article we construct a categorical resolution of singularities of an excellent reduced curve $X$, introducing a certain sheaf of orders on $X$. This categorical resolution is shown to be a recollement of the derived category of coherent sheaves on the normalization of $X$ and the derived category of finite length modules over a certain artinian quasi-hereditary ring $Q$ depending purely on the local singularity types of $X$. Using this technique, we prove several statements on the Rouquier dimension of the derived category of coherent sheaves on $X$. Moreover, in the case $X$ is rational and projective we construct a finite dimensional quasi-hereditary algebra $\Lambda$ such that the triangulated category of perfect complexes on $X$ embeds into $D^b(\Lambda-\mathsf{mod})$ as a full subcategory.Comment: minor changes; to appear in IMR