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Algebraic Geometry Seminar


Spring 2012

Regular Day: Tuesday

Regular Time: 3:30PM - 4:30PM

Regular Location: LCB 222


Date Speaker Talk Information
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January 10

Qile Chen
Columbia Univeristy

The theory of stable log maps was developed recently by Abramovich-Chen-Gross-Siebert to generalize the theory of relative stable maps. To illustrate the idea of using log geometry, I will focus on the basic situation when the target is given by a variety with a Cartier divisor. Stable log maps relative to more complicated boundary, for example simple normal crossings or even toric, can be constructed in a similar manner. This is based on a joint work with Dan Abramovich.
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January 17

Noah Giansiracusa
Universität Zürich

Despite intensive investigation over the years and its innocuously classical appearance, there remain some tantalizing open questions regarding the birational geometry of the moduli space of marked rational curves. One such question, dating from a 2000 paper of Hu and Keel, is to determine whether \(\bar{M}_{0,n}\) is a Mori dream space. Roughly speaking, this would say that its Mori-theoretic information is completely determined by variational GIT in a natural way. In this talk I will discuss joint work with Dave Jensen and Han-Bom Moon in which we construct a wide range of birational models using a GIT construction inspired by two constructions of Kapranov from 1993. These models include \(\bar{M}_{0,n}\) itself as well as all the Hassett weighted models. A consequence is that we exhibit explicit flips between models and give a glimpse of the Mori dream behavior envision by Hu and Keel.
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January 24

Yi Zhu
Stony Brook

A basic question in arithmetic geometry is whether a given variety defined over a non-closed field admits a rational point. When the base field is of geometric nature, i.e., function fields of varieties, one naturally hopes to solve the problem via purely geometric methods. In this talk, I will discuss the geometry of the moduli space of sections of a projective homogeneous space fibration over an algebraic curve and its MRC quotient. By the results of Esnault and Graber-Harris-Starr, it leads to answers for the existence of rational points on projective homogeneous spaces defined either over a global function field or over a function field of an algebraic surface.
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January 27

Morgan Brown
University of California, Berkeley

The Cox Ring of an algebraic variety is a generalization of the homogeneous coordinate ring of a projective variety. I will give an introduction to Cox Rings and how they are used in birational geometry, as well as some ideas from the minimal model program, with the aim of showing that the Cox ring of a Fano variety over the complex numbers is Gorenstein.
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February 14

Chenyang Xu
University of Utah

The famous Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture says that a polarized variety (X,L) admits a constant scalar curvature metric if and only if it is K-polystable. The last notion is a completely algebraic notion which I will concentrate on in this talk. More precisely, we will study the K-stability question of Fano varieties. Our new point is that we will put in the machinery of the Minimal Model Program to modify the test configuration and show that the DF-invariants are decreasing. In particular, we answer a conjecture of Tian under the assumption that the Picard number is 1. This is a joint work with Chi Li.
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February 21

Ching-Jui Lai
University of Utah

Mildly singular Fano varieties of Picard number one are important objects to study from the minimal model program point of view. For the set of three dimensional \(\epsilon\)-klt log \(\mathbb Q\)-Fano pairs \((X,\Delta)\) of Picard number one, we show that there is a volume bound \(-(K_X+\Delta)^3\leq M(3,\epsilon)\) depending only \(\epsilon\). This result is related to the Borisov-Alexeev-Borisov conjecture which asserts boundedness of the set of n-dimensional \(\epsilon\)-klt log \(\mathbb Q\)-Fano varieties.
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February 28

Dung Nguyen
Colorado State University

Counting curves in projective spaces that pass through various linear subspaces and that are tangent to various hyperplanes (or hypersurfaces) is a classical theme in algebraic geometry. An example is there are 3264 conics tangent to 5 general conics in the projective plane. Several fundamental problems in this area remained unsolved until the advent of Kontsevich moduli space of stable maps. In this talk, I will discuss how to use this tool to count genus one space curves.
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March 6

Xiaodong Jiang
University of Utah

In this talk, we are going to prove a uniformity result for the Iitaka fibration f from X to Y, provided that the generic fiber has a good minimal model and the variation of f is zero or that the Kodaira dimension of X is equal to the dimension of X minus 1.
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March 27

Yuchen Zhang
University of Utah

For a nonsingular projective variety X of general type, it's known that |mK_X| induces a birational map for any m sufficiently large. It's an important problem to bound this integer m. In this talk, we will show that, in positive characteristic, |4K_X| is birational providing that X has maximal Albanese dimension.
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April 3

Yi Hu
University of Arizona

In this talk, I will present a derived version of the resolutions of the moduli spaces of stable maps. This resolution can be used to rigorously define the so-called reduced GW numbers of CY threefolds (i.e., the GW numbers associated to the main components of the stable map moduli). The derived resolutions are singular (in the usual sense). For further applications, a resolution (in the usual sense) is desirable; I will describe how to achieve this by a sequence of modular blowups in the case of genera 1 and 2.
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April 10

Melissa Liu
Columbia University

Moduli spaces of semi-stable real and quaternionic vector bundles of fixed topological type over a smooth real algebraic curve can be expressed as Lagrangian quotients and embedded into the symplectic quotient corresponding to the moduli variety of semi-stable algebraic vector bundles of fixed rank and degree on the complexified curve. When the rank and degree are coprime, these Lagrangian quotients are connected components of the real locus of the complex moduli variety endowed with the real structure induced from the real structure of the complex curve. The presentation as a quotient enables us to generalize the methods of Atiyah and Bott to a setting with involutions, and compute the mod 2 Poincare polynomials of these moduli spaces of real and quaternionic vector bundles in the coprime case. This is based on joint work with Florent Schaffhauser.
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April 17

Alberto Chiecchio
University of Washington

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April 24

David Steinberg
University of British Columbia

Donaldson-Thomas theory provides a virtual count of curves on a smooth Calabi-Yau threefold X. When X is singular, Donaldson-Thomas theory is not defined. However, when X is the coarse moduli space of an orbifold, there are two candidates for producing virtual counts related to X: virtual counts on the orbifold itself, and virtual counts on a crepant resolution of X. The Donaldson-Thomas crepant resolution conjecture states that these two approaches are equivalent. In this talk, I will present progress in proving this conjecture by introducing the intermediate counting theory of tilted pairs.