Compactified Jacobians and q,t-Catalan Numbers, I

J. Piontkowski described the homology of the Jacobi factor of a plane curve singularity with one Puiseux pair. We discuss the combinatorial structure of his answer, in particular, relate it to the bigraded deformation of Catalan numbers introduced by A. Garsia and M. Haiman.Comment: Revised version, 24 page

Quot schemes of curves and surfaces: virtual classes, integrals, Euler characteristics

We compute tautological integrals over Quot schemes on curves and surfaces. After obtaining several explicit formulas over Quot schemes of dimension 0 quotients on curves (and finding a new symmetry), we apply the results to tautological integrals against the virtual fundamental classes of Quot schemes of dimension 0 and 1 quotients on surfaces (using also universality, torus localization, and cosection localization). The virtual Euler characteristics of Quot schemes of surfaces, a new theory parallel to the Vafa-Witten Euler characteristics of the moduli of bundles, is defined and studied. Complete formulas for the virtual Euler characteristics are found in the case of dimension 0 quotients on surfaces. Dimension 1 quotients are studied on K3 surfaces and surfaces of general type with connections to the Kawai-Yoshioka formula and the Seiberg-Witten invariants respectively. The dimension 1 theory is completely solved for minimal surfaces of general type admitting a nonsingular canonical curve. Along the way, we find a new connection between weighted tree counting and multivariate Fuss-Catalan numbers which is of independent interest

Generalized q,tq,t-Catalan numbers

Recent work of the first author, Negut and Rasmussen, and of Oblomkov and Rozansky in the context of Khovanov--Rozansky knot homology produces a family of polynomials in $q$ and $t$ labeled by integer sequences. These polynomials can be expressed as equivariant Euler characteristics of certain line bundles on flag Hilbert schemes. The $q,t$-Catalan numbers and their rational analogues are special cases of this construction. In this paper, we give a purely combinatorial treatment of these polynomials and show that in many cases they have nonnegative integer coefficients. For sequences of length at most 4, we prove that these coefficients enumerate subdiagrams in a certain fixed Young diagram and give an explicit symmetric chain decomposition of the set of such diagrams. This strengthens results of Lee, Li and Loehr for $(4,n)$ rational $q,t$-Catalan numbers.Comment: 33 pages; v2: fixed typos and included referee comment

Generating random density matrices

We study various methods to generate ensembles of random density matrices of a fixed size N, obtained by partial trace of pure states on composite systems. Structured ensembles of random pure states, invariant with respect to local unitary transformations are introduced. To analyze statistical properties of quantum entanglement in bi-partite systems we analyze the distribution of Schmidt coefficients of random pure states. Such a distribution is derived in the case of a superposition of k random maximally entangled states. For another ensemble, obtained by performing selective measurements in a maximally entangled basis on a multi--partite system, we show that this distribution is given by the Fuss-Catalan law and find the average entanglement entropy. A more general class of structured ensembles proposed, containing also the case of Bures, forms an extension of the standard ensemble of structureless random pure states, described asymptotically, as N \to \infty, by the Marchenko-Pastur distribution.Comment: 13 pages in latex with 8 figures include