Mircea Mustata

Restricted volumes and base loci of linear series

We introduce and study the restricted volume of a divisor along a subvariety. Our main result is a description of the irreducible components of the augmented base locus by the vanishing of the restricted volume.

Contact loci in arc spaces

We study loci of arcs on a smooth variety defined by order of contact with a fixed subscheme. Specifically, we establish a Nash-type correspondence showing that the irreducible components of these loci arise from (intersections of) exceptional divisors in a resolution of singularities. We show also that these loci account for all the valuations determined by irreducible cylinders in the arc space. Along the way, we recover in an elementary fashion-without using motivic integration-results of the third author relating singularities to arc spaces. Moreover, we extend these results to give a jet-theoretic interpretation of multiplier ideals.

Bernstein-Sato polynomials of arbitrary varieties

We introduce the notion of the Bernstein–Sato polynomial of an arbitrary variety (which is not necessarily reduced nor irreducible) using the theory of V -filtrations of M. Kashiwara and B. Malgrange. We prove that the decreasing filtration by multiplier ideals coincides essentially with the restriction of the V -filtration. This implies a relation between the roots of the Bernstein–Sato polynomial and the jumping coefficients of the multiplier ideals, and also a criterion for rational singularities in terms of the maximal root of the polynomial in the case of a reduced complete intersection. These are generalizations of the hypersurface case. We can calculate the polynomials explicitly in the case of monomial ideals.