Rank-two stable sheaves with odd determinant on Fano threefolds of genus nine

According to Mukai and Iliev, a smooth prime Fano threefold $X$ of genus $9$ is associated with a surface $\mathbb{P }(\mathcal{V })$ , ruled over a smooth plane quartic $\varGamma $ , and the derived category of $\varGamma $ embeds into that of $X$ by a theorem of Kuznetsov. We use this setup to study the moduli spaces of rank- $2$ stable sheaves on $X$ with odd determinant. For each $c_2 \ge 7$ , we prove that a component of their moduli space $\mathsf{M}_X(2,1,c_2)$ is birational to a Brill–Noether locus of vector bundles with fixed rank and degree on $\varGamma $ , having enough sections when twisted by $\mathcal{V }$ . For $c_2=7$ , we prove that $\mathsf{M}_X(2,1,7)$ is isomorphic to the blow-up of the Picard variety $\text{ Pic}^{2}({\varGamma })$ along the curve parametrizing lines contained in $X$ .     

Cohomogeneity-two torus actions on non-negatively curved manifolds of low dimension

Let $\mathrm{M }^n,\, n \in \{4,5,6\}$ , be a compact, simply connected $n$ -manifold which admits some Riemannian metric with non-negative curvature and an isometry group of maximal possible rank. Then any smooth, effective action on $\mathrm{M }^n$ by a torus $\mathrm{T }^{n-2}$ is equivariantly diffeomorphic to an isometric action on a normal biquotient. Furthermore, it follows that any effective, isometric circle action on a compact, simply connected, non-negatively curved four-dimensional manifold is equivariantly diffeomorphic to an effective, isometric action on a normal biquotient.     

How large dimension guarantees a given angle?

We study the following two problems: (1) Given $n\ge 2$ and $0\le \alpha \le 180^\circ $ , how large Hausdorff dimension can a compact set $A\subset \mathbb{R }^n$ have if $A$ does not contain three points that form an angle $\alpha $ ? (2) Given $\alpha $ and $\delta $ , how large Hausdorff dimension can a subset $A$ of a Euclidean space have if $A$ does not contain three points that form an angle in the $\delta $ -neighborhood of $\alpha $ ? An interesting phenomenon is that different angles show different behaviour in the above problems. Apart from the clearly special extreme angles $0$ and $180^\circ $ , the angles $60^\circ , 90^\circ $ and $120^\circ $ also play special role in problem (2): the maximal dimension is smaller for these angles than for the other angles. In problem (1) the angle $90^\circ $ seems to behave differently from other angles.     

Growth estimates for orbits of self-adjoint groups

Let $G$ denote a closed, connected, self-adjoint, noncompact subgroup of $GL(n,\mathbb R )$ , and let $d_{R}$ and $d_{L}$ denote respectively the right and left invariant Riemannian metrics defined by the canonical inner product on $M(n,\mathbb R ) = T_{I} GL(n,\mathbb R )$ . Let $v$ be a nonzero vector of $\mathbb R ^{n}$ such that the orbit $G(v)$ is unbounded in $\mathbb R ^{n}$ . Then the function $g \rightarrow d_{R}(g, G_{v})$ is unbounded, where $G_{v} = \{g \in G : g(v) = v \}$ , and we obtain algebraically defined upper and lower bounds $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ and $\lambda ^{-}(v)$ for the asymptotic behavior of the function $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{R}(g, G_{v})}$ as $d_{R}(g, G_{v}) \rightarrow \infty $ . The upper bound $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ is at most 1. The orbit $G(v)$ is closed in $\mathbb R ^{n} \Leftrightarrow \lambda ^{-}(w)$ is positive for some w $\in G(v)$ . If $G_{v}$ is compact, then $g \rightarrow |d_{R}(g,I) - d_{L}(g,I)|$ is uniformly bounded in $G$ , and the exponents $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ and $\lambda ^{-}(v)$ are sharp upper and lower asymptotic bounds for the functions $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{R}(g,I)}$ and $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{L}(g,I)}$ as $d_{R}(g,I) \rightarrow \infty $ or as $d_{L}(g,I) \rightarrow \infty $ . However, we show by example that if $G_{v}$ is noncompact, then there need not exist asymptotic upper and lower bounds for the function $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{L}(g, G_{v})}$ as $d_{L}(g, G_{v}) \rightarrow \infty $ . The results apply to representations of noncompact semisimple Lie groups $G$ on finite dimensional real vector spaces. We compute $\lambda ^{+}$ and $\lambda ^{-}$ for the irreducible, real representations of $SL(2,\mathbb R )$ , and we show that if the dimension of the $SL(2,\mathbb R )$ -module $V$ is odd, then $\lambda ^{+} = \lambda ^{-}$ on a nonempty open subset of $V$ . We show that the function $\lambda ^{-}$ is $K$ -invariant, where $K = O(n,\mathbb R ) \cap G$ . We do not know if $\lambda ^{-}$ is $G$ -invariant.     

Stability results for the N-dimensional Schiffer conjecture via a perturbation method

Given a eigenvalue $\mu _{0m}^2$ of $-\Delta $ in the unit ball $B_1$ , with Neumann boundary conditions, we prove that there exists a class $\mathcal{D}$ of $C^{0,1}$ -domains, depending on $\mu _{0m} $ , such that if $u$ is a no trivial solution to the following problem $ \Delta u+\mu u=0$ in $\Omega , u=0$ on $\partial \Omega $ , and $ \int \nolimits _{\partial \Omega }\partial _{\mathbf{n}}u=0$ , with $\Omega \in \mathcal{D}$ , and $\mu =\mu _{0m}^2+o(1)$ , then $\Omega $ is a ball. Here $\mu $ is a eigenvalue of $-\Delta $ in $\Omega $ , with Neumann boundary conditions.     

Ergodicity of laminations with singularities in Kähler surfaces

Let $\mathcal F $ be a holomorphic foliation on $\mathcal M $ , a homogeneous compact Kähler surface, with only hyperbolic singularities. Let $\mathcal L $ be a closed set saturated by leaves of the foliation, containing singularities and with every leaf dense on it. If there are no positive closed currents directed by $\mathcal L $ , then there is a unique positive harmonic current directed by $\mathcal L $ of mass one. This result was previously obtained for $\mathbb CP ^2$ by Fornæss and Sibony and we obtain the result for the rest of homogeneous compact Kähler surfaces.     

Invariant Hilbert schemes and desingularizations of symplectic reductions for classical groups

Let $G \subset GL(V)$ be a reductive algebraic subgroup acting on the symplectic vector space $W=(V \oplus V^*)^{\oplus m}$ , and let $\mu :\ W \rightarrow Lie(G)^*$ be the corresponding moment map. In this article, we use the theory of invariant Hilbert schemes to construct a canonical desingularization of the symplectic reduction $\mu ^{-1}(0)/\!/G$ for classes of examples where $G=GL(V)$ , $O(V)$ , or $Sp(V)$ . For these classes of examples, $\mu ^{-1}(0)/\!/G$ is isomorphic to the closure of a nilpotent orbit in a simple Lie algebra, and we compare the Hilbert–Chow morphism with the (well-known) symplectic desingularizations of $\mu ^{-1}(0)/\!/G$ .     

The topology of parabolic character varieties of free groups

Let $G$ be a complex affine algebraic reductive group, and let $K\,\subset \, G$ be a maximal compact subgroup. Fix h $\,:=\,(h_{1}\,,\ldots \,,h_{m})\,\in \, K^{m}$ . For $n\, \ge \, 0$ , let $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ (respectively, $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ ) be the space of equivalence classes of representations of the free group on $m+n$ generators in $G$ (respectively, $K$ ) such that for each $1\le i\le m$ , the image of the $i$ -th free generator is conjugate to $h_{i}$ . These spaces are parabolic analogues of character varieties of free groups. We prove that $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ is a strong deformation retraction of $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ . In particular, $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ and $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{K}$ are homotopy equivalent. We also describe explicit examples relating $\mathsf X _{\mathbf{{h}},n}^{G}$ to relative character varieties.     

On the structure of co-Kähler manifolds

By the work of Li, a compact co-Kähler manifold $M$ is a mapping torus $K_\varphi $ , where $K$ is a Kähler manifold and $\varphi $ is a Hermitian isometry. We show here that there is always a finite cyclic cover $\overline{M}$ of the form $\overline{M} \cong K \times S^1$ , where $\cong $ is equivariant diffeomorphism with respect to an action of $S^1$ on $M$ and the action of $S^1$ on $K \times S^1$ by translation on the second factor. Furthermore, the covering transformations act diagonally on $S^1, K$ and are translations on the $S^1$ factor. In this way, we see that, up to a finite cover, all compact co-Kähler manifolds arise as the product of a Kähler manifold and a circle.     

Symbolic extensions and dominated splittings for generic C^{1}-diffeomorphisms

Let $\mathrm{Diff }^1(M)$ be the set of all $C^1$ -diffeomorphisms $f:M\rightarrow M$ , where $M$ is a compact boundaryless d-dimensional manifold, $d\ge 2$ . We prove that there is a residual subset $\mathfrak R $ of $\mathrm{Diff }^1(M)$ such that if $f\in \mathfrak R $ and if $H(p)$ is the homoclinic class associated with a hyperbolic periodic point $p$ , then either $H(p)$ admits a dominated splitting of the form $E\oplus F_1\oplus \dots \oplus F_k\oplus G$ , where $F_i$ is not hyperbolic and one-dimensional, or $f|_{H(p)}$ has no symbolic extensions.     

The Set of Packing and Covering Densities of Convex Disks

For every convex disk $K$ (a convex compact subset of the plane, with non-void interior), the packing density $\delta (K)$ and covering density ${\vartheta (K)}$ form an ordered pair of real numbers, i.e., a point in $\mathbb{R }^2$ . The set $\varOmega $ consisting of points assigned this way to all convex disks is the subject of this article. A few known inequalities on $\delta (K)$ and ${\vartheta (K)}$ jointly outline a relatively small convex polygon $P$ that contains $\varOmega $ , while the exact shape of $\varOmega $ remains a mystery. Here we describe explicitly a leaf-shaped convex region $\Lambda $ contained in $\varOmega $ and occupying a good portion of $P$ . The sets $\varOmega _T$ and $\varOmega _L$ of translational packing and covering densities and lattice packing and covering densities are defined similarly, restricting the allowed arrangements of $K$ to translated copies or lattice arrangements, respectively. Due to affine invariance of the translative and lattice density functions, the sets $\varOmega _T$ and $\varOmega _L$ are compact. Furthermore, the sets $\varOmega , \,\varOmega _T$ and $\varOmega _L$ contain the subsets $\varOmega ^\star , \,\varOmega _T^\star $ and $\varOmega _L^\star $ respectively, corresponding to the centrally symmetric convex disks $K$ , and our leaf $\Lambda $ is contained in each of $\varOmega ^\star , \,\varOmega _T^\star $ and $\varOmega _L^\star $ .     

Properly discontinuous isometric group actions on inhomogeneous Lorentzian manifolds

If a homogeneous space $G/H$ is acted properly discontinuously upon by a subgroup $\varGamma $ of $G$ via the left action, the quotient space $\varGamma \backslash G/H$ is called a Clifford–Klein form. In Calabi and Markus (Ann Math (2) 75: 63–76, 1962) proved that there is no infinite subgroup of the Lorentz group $O(n+1,\,1)$ whose left action on the de Sitter space $O(n+1,\,1)/O(n,\,1)$ is properly discontinuous. It follows that a compact Clifford–Klein form of the de Sitter space never exists. In the present paper, we provide a new extension of the theorem of E. Calabi and L. Markus to a certain class of Lorentzian manifolds that are not necessarily homogeneous by using the techniques of differential geometry.     

Multiple P-invariant closed characteristics on partially symmetric compact convex hypersurfaces in {\varvec{R}}^{2n}

In this paper, let $n$ be a positive integer and $P=diag(-I_{n-\kappa },I_\kappa ,-I_{n-\kappa },I_\kappa )$ for some integer $\kappa \in [0, n]$ , we prove that for any compact convex hypersurface $\Sigma $ in $\mathbf{R}^{2n}$ with $n\ge 2$ there exist at least two geometrically distinct P-invariant closed characteristics on $\Sigma $ , provided that $\Sigma $ is P-symmetric, i.e., $x\in \Sigma $ implies $Px\in \Sigma $ . This work is shown to extend and unify several earlier works on this subject.     

A unified approach for minimizing composite norms

We propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian algorithm (FALC) to solve the composite norm minimization problem $$\begin{aligned} \begin{array}{ll} \min \limits _{X\in \mathbb{R }^{m\times n}}&\mu _1\Vert \sigma (\mathcal{F }(X)-G)\Vert _\alpha +\mu _2\Vert \mathcal{C }(X)-d\Vert _\beta ,\\ \text{ subject} \text{ to}&\mathcal{A }(X)-b\in \mathcal{Q }, \end{array} \end{aligned}$$ where $\sigma (X)$ denotes the vector of singular values of $X \in \mathbb{R }^{m\times n}$ , the matrix norm $\Vert \sigma (X)\Vert _{\alpha }$ denotes either the Frobenius, the nuclear, or the $\ell _2$ -operator norm of $X$ , the vector norm $\Vert .\Vert _{\beta }$ denotes either the $\ell _1$ -norm, $\ell _2$ -norm or the $\ell _{\infty }$ -norm; $\mathcal{Q }$ is a closed convex set and $\mathcal{A }(.)$ , $\mathcal{C }(.)$ , $\mathcal{F }(.)$ are linear operators from $\mathbb{R }^{m\times n}$ to vector spaces of appropriate dimensions. Basis pursuit, matrix completion, robust principal component pursuit (PCP), and stable PCP problems are all special cases of the composite norm minimization problem. Thus, FALC is able to solve all these problems in a unified manner. We show that any limit point of FALC iterate sequence is an optimal solution of the composite norm minimization problem. We also show that for all $\epsilon >0$ , the FALC iterates are $\epsilon $ -feasible and $\epsilon $ -optimal after $\mathcal{O }(\log (\epsilon ^{-1}))$ iterations, which require $\mathcal{O }(\epsilon ^{-1})$ constrained shrinkage operations and Euclidean projection onto the set $\mathcal{Q }$ . Surprisingly, on the problem sets we tested, FALC required only $\mathcal{O }(\log (\epsilon ^{-1}))$ constrained shrinkage, instead of the $\mathcal{O }(\epsilon ^{-1})$ worst case bound, to compute an $\epsilon $ -feasible and $\epsilon $ -optimal solution. To best of our knowledge, FALC is the first algorithm with a known complexity bound that solves the stable PCP problem.     

New approximations for the cone of copositive matrices and its dual

We provide convergent hierarchies for the convex cone $\mathcal{C }$ of copositive matrices and its dual $\mathcal{C }^*$ , the cone of completely positive matrices. In both cases the corresponding hierarchy consists of nested spectrahedra and provide outer (resp. inner) approximations for $\mathcal{C }$ (resp. for its dual $\mathcal{C }^*$ ), thus complementing previous inner (resp. outer) approximations for $\mathcal{C }$ (for $\mathcal{C }^*$ ). In particular, both inner and outer approximations have a very simple interpretation. Finally, extension to $\mathcal{K }$ -copositivity and $\mathcal{K }$ -complete positivity for a closed convex cone $\mathcal{K }$ , is straightforward.     

Hurwitz-type bound, knot surgery, and smooth {\mathbb{S }}^1-four-manifolds

In this paper we prove several related results concerning smooth $\mathbb{Z }_p$ or $\mathbb{S }^1$ actions on $4$ -manifolds. We show that there exists an infinite sequence of smooth $4$ -manifolds $X_n$ , $n\ge 2$ , which have the same integral homology and intersection form and the same Seiberg-Witten invariant, such that each $X_n$ supports no smooth $\mathbb{S }^1$ -actions but admits a smooth $\mathbb{Z }_n$ -action. In order to construct such manifolds, we devise a method for annihilating smooth $\mathbb{S }^1$ -actions on $4$ -manifolds using Fintushel-Stern knot surgery, and apply it to the Kodaira-Thurston manifold in an equivariant setting. Finally, the method for annihilating smooth $\mathbb{S }^1$ -actions relies on a new obstruction we derived in this paper for existence of smooth $\mathbb{S }^1$ -actions on a $4$ -manifold: the fundamental group of a smooth $\mathbb{S }^1$ -four-manifold with nonzero Seiberg-Witten invariant must have infinite center. We also include a discussion on various analogous or related results in the literature, including locally linear actions or smooth actions in dimensions other than four.     

Lattice-theoretic characterizations of the group classes {\mathfrak{N}^{k-1}\mathfrak{A}} and {\mathfrak{N}^k} for k?�� 2

Let ${2\leq k\in \mathbb{N}}$ . Recently, Costantini and Zacher obtained a lattice-theoretic characterization of the classes ${\mathfrak{N}^k}$ of finite soluble groups with nilpotent length at most k. It is the aim of this paper to give a lattice-theoretic characterization of the classes ${\mathfrak{N}^{k-1}\mathfrak{A}}$ of finite groups with commutator subgroup in ${\mathfrak{N}^{k-1}}$ ; in addition, our method also yields a new characterization of the classes ${\mathfrak{N}^k}$ . The main idea of our approach is to use two well-known theorems of Gaschütz on the Frattini and Fitting subgroups of finite groups.     

Howe correspondence and Springer correspondence for real reductive dual pairs

We consider a real reductive dual pair (G′, G) of type I, with rank ${({\rm G}^{\prime}) \leq {\rm rank(G)}}$ . Given a nilpotent coadjoint orbit ${\mathcal{O}^{\prime} \subseteq \mathfrak{g}^{{\prime}{*}}}$ , let ${\mathcal{O}^{\prime}_\mathbb{C} \subseteq \mathfrak{g}^{{\prime}{*}}_\mathbb{C}}$ denote the complex orbit containing ${\mathcal{O}^{\prime}}$ . Under some condition on the partition λ′ parametrizing ${\mathcal{O}^{\prime}}$ , we prove that, if λ is the partition obtained from λ by adding a column on the very left, and ${\mathcal{O}}$ is the nilpotent coadjoint orbit parametrized by λ, then ${\mathcal{O}_\mathbb{C}= \tau (\tau^{\prime -1}(\mathcal{O}_\mathbb{C}^{\prime}))}$ , where ${\tau, \tau^{\prime}}$ are the moment maps. Moreover, if ${chc(\hat\mu_{\mathcal{O}^{\prime}}) \neq 0}$ , where chc is the infinitesimal version of the Cauchy-Harish-Chandra integral, then the Weyl group representation attached by Wallach to ${\mu_{\mathcal{O}^{\prime}}}$ with corresponds to ${\mathcal{O}_\mathbb{C}}$ via the Springer correspondence.     

Normal generation and \ell ^2-Betti numbers of groups

The normal rank of a group is the minimal number of elements whose normal closure coincides with the group. We study the relation between the normal rank of a group and its first $\ell ^2$ -Betti number and conjecture the inequality $\beta _1^{(2)}(G) \le \mathrm{nrk}(G)-1$ for torsion free groups. The conjecture is proved for limits of left-orderable amenable groups. On the other hand, for every $n\ge 2$ and every $\varepsilon >0$ , we give an example of a simple group $Q$ (with torsion) such that $\beta _1^{(2)}(Q) \ge n-1-\varepsilon $ . These groups also provide examples of simple groups of rank exactly $n$ for every $n\ge 2$ ; existence of such examples for $n> 3$ was unknown until now.