The Horrocks-Mumford bundle restricted to planes

We study the behavior of the Horrocks-Mumford bundle when restricted to a plane P^2 in P^4, looking for all possible minimal free resolutions for the restricted bundle. To each of the 6 resolutions (4 stable and 2 unstable) we find, we then associate a subvariety of the Grassmannian G(2,4) of planes in P^4. We thus obtain a filtration of the Grassmannian, which we describe in the second part of this work.Comment: 19 pages, typos removed, added details in Propostions 2.1 and 3.

On the codimension of permanental varieties

In this article, we study permanental varieties, i.e. varieties defined by the vanishing of permanents of fixed size of a generic matrix. Permanents and their varieties play an important, and sometimes poorly understood, role in combinatorics. However, there are essentially no geometric results about them in the literature, in very sharp contrast to the well-behaved and ubiquitous case of determinants and minors. Motivated by the study of the singular locus of the permanental hypersurface, we focus on the codimension of these varieties. We introduce a $\mathbb C^{*}$-action on matrices and prove a number of results. In particular, we improve a lower bound on the codimension of the aforementioned singular locus established by von zur Gathen in 1987.Comment: 20

Uniform determinantal representations

The problem of expressing a specific polynomial as the determinant of a square matrix of affine-linear forms arises from algebraic geometry, optimisation, complexity theory, and scientific computing. Motivated by recent developments in this last area, we introduce the notion of a uniform determinantal representation, not of a single polynomial but rather of all polynomials in a given number of variables and of a given maximal degree. We derive a lower bound on the size of the matrix, and present a construction achieving that lower bound up to a constant factor as the number of variables is fixed and the degree grows. This construction marks an improvement upon a recent construction due to Plestenjak-Hochstenbach, and we investigate the performance of new representations in their root-finding technique for bivariate systems. Furthermore, we relate uniform determinantal representations to vector spaces of singular matrices, and we conclude with a number of future research directions.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Secants of Lagrangian Grassmannians

We study the dimensions of secant varieties of the Grassmannian of Lagrangian subspaces in a symplectic vector space. We calculate these dimensions for third and fourth secant varieties. Our result is obtained by providing a normal form for four general points on such a Grassmannian and by explicitly calculating the tangent spaces at these four points

Linear spaces of matrices of constant rank and instanton bundles

We present a new method to study 4-dimensional linear spaces of skew-symmetric matrices of constant co-rank 2, based on rank 2 vector bundles on P^3 and derived category tools. The method allows one to prove the existence of new examples of size 10x10 and 14x14 via instanton bundles of charge 2 and 4 respectively, and provides an explanation for what used to be the only known example (Westwick 1996). We also give an algorithm to construct explicitly a matrix of size 14 of this type.Comment: Revised version, 22 pages. Brief intro to derived category tools and details to proof of Lemma 3.5 added, some typos correcte

A note on secants of Grassmannians

Let G(k,n) be the Grassmannian of k-subspaces in an n- dimensional complex vector space, k ≥ 3. Given a projective variety X, its s-secant variety σs(X) is defined to be the closure of the union of linear spans of all the s-tuples of independent points lying on X. We classify all defective σs(G(k, n)) for s ≤ 12