Ludmil Katzarkov

Mirror symmetry for Del Pezzo surfaces: Vanishing cycles and coherent sheaves

We study homological mirror symmetry for Del Pezzo surfaces and their mirror Landau-Ginzburg models. In particular, we show that the derived category of coherent sheaves on a Del Pezzo surface Xk obtained by blowing up ℂℙ2 at k points is equivalent to the derived category of vanishing cycles of a certain elliptic fibration Wk:Mk→ℂ with k+3 singular fibers, equipped with a suitable symplectic form. Moreover, we also show that this mirror correspondence between derived categories can be extended to noncommutative deformations of Xk, and give an explicit correspondence between the deformation parameters for Xk and the cohomology class [B+iω]∈H2(Mk,ℂ).

Singular Lefschetz pencils

We consider structures analogous to symplectic Lefschetz pencils in the context of a closed 4–manifold equipped with a “near-symplectic” structure (ie, a closed 2–form which is symplectic outside a union of circles where it vanishes transversely). Our main result asserts that, up to blowups, every near-symplectic 4–manifold (X, ω) can be decomposed into (a) two symplectic Lefschetz fibrations over discs, and (b) a fibre bundle over S 1 which relates the boundaries of the Lefschetz fibrations to each other via a sequence of fibrewise handle additions taking place in a neighbourhood of the zero set of the 2–form. Conversely, from such a decomposition one can recover a near-symplectic structure.

Homological mirror symmetry for punctured spheres

We prove that the wrapped Fukaya category of a punctured sphere (S with an arbitrary number of points removed) is equivalent to the triangulated category of singularities of a mirror Landau-Ginzburg model, proving one side of the homological mirror symmetry conjecture in this case. By investigating fractional gradings on these categories, we conclude that cyclic covers on the symplectic side are mirror to orbifold quotients of the Landau-Ginzburg model.

Homological Mirror Symmetry for manifolds of general type

In this paper we outline the foundations of Homological Mirror Symmetry for manifolds of general type. Both Physics and Categorical prospectives are considered.

Flat surfaces and stability structures

We identify spaces of half-translation surfaces, equivalently complex curves with quadratic differential, with spaces of stability structures on Fukaya-type categories of punctured surfaces. This is achieved by new methods involving the complete classification of objects in these categories, which are defined in an elementary way. We also introduce a number of tools to deal with surfaces of infinite area, where structures similar to those in cluster algebra appear.

Orlov spectra: bounds and gaps

The Orlov spectrum is a new invariant of a triangulated category. It was introduced by D. Orlov, building on work of A. Bondal-M. Van den Bergh and R. Rouquier. The supremum of the Orlov spectrum of a triangulated category is called the ultimate dimension. In this work, we study Orlov spectra of triangulated categories arising in mirror symmetry. We introduce the notion of gaps and outline their geometric significance. We provide the first large class of examples where the ultimate dimension is finite: categories of singularities associated to isolated hypersurface singularities. Similarly, given any nonzero object in the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on a smooth Calabi-Yau hypersurface, we produce a generator, by closing the object under a certain monodromy action, and uniformly bound this generator’s generation time. In addition, we provide new upper bounds on the generation times of exceptional collections and connect generation time to braid group actions to provide a lower bound on the ultimate dimension of the derived Fukaya category of a symplectic surface of genus greater than one.

Determinantal Barlow surfaces and phantom categories

We prove that the bounded derived category of the surface S constructed by Barlow admits a length 11 exceptional sequence consisting of (explicit) line bundles. Moreover, we show that in a small neighbourhood of S in the moduli space of determinantal Barlow surfaces, the generic surface has a semiorthogonal decomposition of its derived category into a length 11 exceptional sequence of line bundles and a category with trivial Grothendieck group and Hochschild homology, called a phantom category. This is done using a deformation argument and the fact that the derived endomorphism algebra of the sequence is constant. Applying Kuznetsovs results on heights of exceptional sequences, we also show that the sequence on S itself is not full and its (left or right) orthogonal complement is also a phantom category.

Homological Projective Duality via Variation of Geometric Invariant Theory Quotients

We provide a geometric approach to constructing Lefschetz collections and Landau-Ginzburg Homological Projective Duals from a variation of Geometric Invariant Theory quotients. This approach yields homological projective duals for Veronese embeddings in the setting of Landau Ginzburg models. Our results also extend to a relative Homological Projective Duality framework.

Double solids, categories and non-rationality

This paper suggests a new approach to questions of rationality of threefolds based on category theory. Following M. Ballard, D. Favero, L. Katzarkov (ArXiv:1012.0864) and D. Favero, L. Katzarkov (Noether--Lefschetz Spectra and Algebraic cycles, in preparation) we enhance constructions from A. Kuznetsov (arXiv:0904.4330) by introducing Noether--Lefschetz spectra --- an interplay between Orlov spectra (C. Oliva, Algebraic cycles and Hodge theory on generalized Reye congruences, Compos. Math. 92, No. 1 (1994) 1--22) and Hochschild homology. The main goal of this paper is to suggest a series of interesting examples where above techniques might apply. We start by constructing a sextic double solid

Schematic homotopy types and non-abelian Hodge theory

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