On pliability of del Pezzo fibrations and Cox rings

We develop some concrete methods to build Sarkisov links, starting from Mori fibre spaces. This is done by studying low rank Cox rings and their properties. As part of this development, we give an algorithm to construct explicitly the coarse moduli space of a toric Deligne-Mumford stack. This can be viewed as the generalisation of the notion of well-formedness for weighted projective spaces to homogeneous coordinate ring of toric varieties. As an illustration, we apply these methods to study birational transformations of certain fibrations of del Pezzo surfaces over $\mathbb{P}^1$, into other Mori fibre spaces, using Cox rings and variation of geometric invariant theory. We show that the pliability of these Mori fibre spaces is at least three and they are not rational

On the motives of moduli of chains and Higgs bundles

We take another approach to Hitchin's strategy of computing the cohomology of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles by localization with respect to the circle-action. Our computation is done in the dimensional completion of the Grothendieck ring of varieties and starts by describing the classes of moduli stacks of chains rather than their coarse moduli spaces. As an application we show that the n-torsion of the Jacobian acts trivially on the middle dimensional cohomology of the moduli space of twisted SL_n-Higgs-bundles of degree coprime to n and we give an explicit formula for the motive of the moduli space of Higgs bundles of rank 4 and odd degree. This provides new evidence for a conjecture of Hausel and Rodr\'iguez-Villegas. Along the way we find explicit recursion formulas for the motives of several types of moduli spaces of stable chains.Comment: 44 page

Moduli of algebraic varieties

We develop a moduli theory of algebraic varieties and pairs of non-negative Kodaira dimension. We define stable minimal models and construct their projective coarse moduli spaces under certain natural conditions. This can be applied to a wide range of moduli problems in algebraic geometry.Comment: 67 page