Derived categories of families of sextic del Pezzo surfaces

Abstract

We construct a natural semiorthogonal decomposition for the derived category of an arbitrary flat family of sextic del Pezzo surfaces with at worst du Val singularities. This decomposition has three components equivalent to twisted derived categories of finite flat schemes of degrees 1, 3, and 2 over the base of the family. We provide a modular interpretation for these schemes and compute them explicitly in a number of standard families. For two such families the computation is based on a symmetric version of homological projective duality for $\mathbb{P}^2 \times \mathbb{P}^2$ and $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$, which we explain in an appendix.