arXiv research

Study of tautological forms on curve moduli spaces.

Starting from the description of Segre forms as direct images of (powers of) the first Chern form of the (anti)tautological line bundle on the projectivized bundle of a holomorphic hermitian vector bundle, we derive a version of the pointwise Kobayashi-Lübke inequality.

Diagonalizes tautological classes of definite 4-manifolds.

Constructs differential characters on nonlinear Graßmannians.

Tautological classes, or generalised Miller-Morita-Mumford classes, are basic characteristic classes of smooth fibre bundles, and have recently been used to describe the rational cohomology of classifying spaces of diffeomorphism groups for several types of manifolds. We show that rationally tautological classes depend…

Strata of $k$-differentials on smooth curves parameterize sections of the $k$-th power of the canonical bundle with prescribed orders of zeros and poles. Define the tautological ring of the projectivized strata using the $κ$ and $ψ$ classes of moduli spaces of pointed smooth curves along with the tautological class $η$…

The paper studies tautological rings of strata of differentials, proving cohomological stability and no relations in specific degrees.

New operators in Khovanov-Rozansky homology exhibit symmetry.

New forms calibrate minimal graphs in arbitrary dimensions.

Given a flexible $n$-gon with generic side lengths, the moduli space of its configurations in $\mathbb{R}^2$ as well as in $\mathbb{R}^3$ is a smooth manifold. It is equipped with $n$ \textit{tautological} line bundles whose definition is motivated by M. Kontsevich's tautological bundles over $\mathcal{M}_{0,n}$. We st…

The paper constructs cohomology classes on curve strata.

Researchers establish a connection between knot homology and Lie algebra actions.

The materials accompany a lecture short course presented at the 2011 Park City Mathematics Institute, Graduate Summer School on Moduli Spaces of Riemann Surfaces. The lectures were part of/coordinated with an overall program, including lectures by Ursula Hamenstadt on Teichmueller Theory, Andy Putman on Mapping Class a…

The study explores tautological classes and their vanishing/nontriviality for manifolds with odd dimensions.

Completed volumes match with combinatorial classes of the double ramification cycle.

We discuss general notions of metrics and of Finsler structures which we call weak metrics and weak Finsler structures. Any convex domain carries a canonical weak Finsler structure, which we call its tautological weak Finsler structure. We compute distances in the tautological weak Finsler structure of a domain and we …

For a Lie group G and a smooth manifold W, we study the difference between smooth actions of G on W and bundles over the classifying space of G with fiber W and structure group Diff(W). In particular, we exhibit smooth manifold bundles over BSU(2) that are not induced by an action. The main tool for reaching this goal …

We introduce a space of stable meromorphic differentials with poles of prescribed orders and define its tautological cohomology ring. This space, just as the space of holomorphic differentials, is stratified according to the set of multiplicities of zeros of the differential. The main goal of this paper is to compute t…

For a connected Lie group G, we show that a complex structure on the total space TG of the tangent bundle of G that is left invariant and has the property that each left translation G-orbit is a totally real submanifold is induced from a smooth immersion of TG into the complexification of G. For G compact and connected…

Establishes metrics with positive curvature on projective line bundles.

Homology of abelian differentials stabilizes with more zeros.

For $G$ a finite subgroup of ${\rm SL}(3,{\mathbb C})$ acting freely on ${\mathbb C}^3{\setminus} \{0\}$ a crepant resolution of the Calabi-Yau orbifold ${\mathbb C}^3\!/G$ always exists and has the geometry of an ALE non-compact manifold. We show that the tautological bundles on these crepant resolutions admit rigid H…

Given an $n$-gon, the poset of all collections of pairwise non-crossing diagonals is isomorphic to the face poset of some convex polytope called \textit{associahedron}. We replace in this setting the $n$-gon (viewed as a disc with $n$ marked points on the boundary) with an arbitrary oriented surface with a number of la…

The paper defines and computes volumes of meromorphic differentials with simple poles.

The paper proves properties of strata of differentials, showing they are affine and extremal.

We present a formula for the full Cheeger-Chern-Simons class of the tautological flat complex vector bundle of rank two over BSL(2,\C^δ). Our formula improves the formula by Dupont and Zickert, where the class is only computed modulo 2-torsion.

We show how to define and count lattice points in the moduli space $\modm_{g,n}$ of genus g curves with n labeled points. This produces a polynomial with coefficients that include the Euler characteristic of the moduli space, and tautological intersection numbers on the compactified moduli space.

This paper discusses reformulations of the problem of coloring plane maps with four colors. We give a number of alternate ways to formulate the coloring problem including a tautological expansion similar to the Penrose Bracket, and an extension of the Penrose Bracket that counts colorings of arbitrary cubic graphs pres…

We show that a conjectural extension of a fixed point formula in Arakelov geometry implies results about a tautological subring in the arithmetic Chow ring of bases of abelian schemes. Among the results are an Arakelov version of the Hirzebruch proportionality principle and a formula for a critical power of $\hat c_1$ …

Paper connects volumes of moduli spaces of super Riemann surfaces to integrals over stable Riemann surfaces.

In the first part we extend the construction of the smooth normal-crossing divisors compactification of projectivized strata of abelian differentials given by Bainbridge, Chen, Gendron, Grushevsky and Moeller to the case of k-differentials. Since the generalized construction is closely related to the original one, we m…

Calculates volumes of linear subvarieties in moduli spaces of Abelian differentials.

In this paper, we give a new genus-3 topological recursion relation for Gromov-Witten invariants of compact symplectic manifolds. This formula also applies to intersection numbers on moduli spaces of spin curves. A by-product of the proof of this formula is a new relation in the tautological ring of the moduli space of…

On a convex body in a Euclidean space, we introduce a new variational formulation for its Funk metric, a Finsler metric compatible with the tautological Finsler structure of the convex body. We generalize the metric on Teichmuller spaces with the Weil-Petersson distance function. A set of similarities the resulting met…

In this paper, we give some new genus-3 universal equations for Gromov-Witten invariants of compact symplectic manifolds. These equations were obtained by studying new relations in the tautological ring of the moduli space of 2-pointed genus-3 stable curves. A byproduct of our search for genus-3 equations is a new genu…

Let $QF(S)$ be the quasifuchsian space of a closed surface $S$ of genus $g\geq 2$. We construct a new mapping class group invariant Kähler metric on $QF(S)$. It is an extension of the Weil-Petersson metric onthe Teichmüller space $\mathcal T(S)\subset QF(S)$. We also calculate its curvature and prove some negativity fo…

Following a suggestion made by J.-P. Demailly, for each $k\ge 1$, we endow, by an induction process, the $k$-th (anti)tautological line bundle $\mathcal O_{X_k}(1)$ of an arbitrary complex directed manifold $(X,V)$ with a natural smooth hermitian metric. Then, we compute recursively the Chern curvature form for this me…

David Hilbert discovered in 1895 an important metric that is canonically associated to any convex domain $Ω$ in the Euclidean (or projective) space. This metric is known to be Finslerian, and the usual proof assumes a certain degree of smoothness of the boundary of $Ω$ and refers to a theorem by Busemann and Mayer that…

The paper proves a pointwise Gysin formula for vector bundles and applies it to show positivity of polynomials.

Surface bundles' signatures tied to their Euler characteristics.

The paper develops a non-transitive Cartan connection for sub-Riemannian manifolds.

We define and count lattice points in the moduli space of stable genus g curves with n labeled points. This extends a construction of the second author for the uncompactified moduli space. The enumeration produces polynomials with top degree coefficients tautological intersection numbers on the compactified moduli spac…

In this paper we prove a conjecture by Feldman-Ilmanen-Knopf in \cite{FIK} that the gradient shrinking soliton metric they constructed on the tautological line bundle over $\CP^1$ is the uniform limit of blow-ups of a type I Ricci flow singularity on a closed manifold. We use this result to show that limits of blow-ups…

We give a fresh introduction to the Khovanov Homology theory for knots and links, with special emphasis on its extension to tangles, cobordisms and 2-knots. By staying within a world of topological pictures a little longer than in other articles on the subject, the required extension becomes essentially tautological. A…

The curvature of web curves is studied in 3D manifolds.

We show that any degree at least $g$ polynomial in descendant or tautological classes vanishes on $M_{g,n}$ when $g\ge 2$. This generalizes a result of Looijenga and proves a version of Getzler's conjecture. The method we use is the study of the relative Gromov-Witten invariants of $P^1$ relative 2 points combined with…

We study the ring generated by the Chern classes of tautological line bundles on the moduli space of parabolic bundles of arbitrary rank on a Riemann surface. We show the Poincaré duals to these Chern classes have simple geometric representatives. We use this construction to show that the ring generated by these Chern …

This survey paper begins with the description of the duality between arc systems and ribbon graphs embedded in a punctured surface. Then we explain how to cellularize the moduli space of curves in two different ways: using Jenkins-Strebel differentials and using hyperbolic geometry. We also briefly discuss how these tw…