arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Schmidt.
A half-geodesic is a closed geodesic realizing the distance between any pair of its points. All geodesics in a round sphere are half-geodesics. Conversely, this note establishes that Riemannian spheres with all geodesics closed and sufficiently many half-geodesics are round.
We generalize a classical result about the genus of curves in projective space by Gruson and Peskine to principally polarized abelian threefolds of Picard rank one. The proof is based on wall-crossing techniques for ideal sheaves of curves in the derived category. In the process, we obtain bounds for Chern characters of other stable objects such as rank two sheaves. The argument gives a proof for projective space as well. In this case these techniques also indicate an approach for a conjecture by Hartshorne and Hirschowitz and we prove first steps towards it.
A smooth foliation of a Riemannian manifold is metric when its leaves are locally equidistant and is homogenous when its leaves are locally orbits of a Lie group acting by isometries. Homogenous foliations are metric foliations, but metric foliations need not be homogenous foliations. We prove that a homogenous three-sphere is naturally reductive if and only if all of its metric foliations are homogenous.
We give a complete classification of semistable rank two sheaves on three-dimensional projective space with maximal third Chern character. This implies an explicit description of their moduli spaces. As an open subset they contain rank two reflexive sheaves with maximal number of singularities. These spaces are irreducible, and apart from a single special case, they are also smooth. This extends a result by Okonek and Spindler to all missing cases and gives a new proof of their result. The key technical ingredient is variation of stability in the derived category.
We give further counterexamples to the conjectural construction of Bridgeland stability on threefolds due to Bayer, Macrì, and Toda. This includes smooth projective threefolds containing a divisor that contracts to a point, and Weierstraß elliptic Calabi-Yau threefolds. Furthermore, we show that if the original conjecture, or a minor modification of it, holds on a smooth projective threefold, then the space of stability conditions is non-empty on the blow up at an arbitrary point. More precisely, there are stability conditions on the blow up for which all skyscraper sheaves are semistable.
Let $M$ be a complete Riemannian manifold and suppose $p\in M$. For each unit vector $v \in T_p M$, the $\textit{Jacobi operator}$, $\mathcal{J}_v: v^\perp \rightarrow v^\perp$ is the symmetric endomorphism, $\mathcal{J}_v(w) = R(w,v)v$. Then $p$ is an $\textit{isotropic point}$ if there exists a constant $κ_p \in \mathbf{R}$ such that $\mathcal{J}_v = κ_p \textit{ Id}_{v^\perp}$ for each unit vector $v \in T_pM$. If all points are isotropic, then $M$ is said to be isotropic; it is a classical result of Schur that isotropic manifolds of dimension at least 3 have constant sectional curvatures. In this paper we consider $\textit{almost isotropic manifolds}$, i.e. manifolds having the property that for each $p \in M$, there exists a constant $κ_p \in \mathbb{R}$, such that the Jacobi operators $\mathcal{J}_v$ satisfy $\text{rank}(\mathcal{J}_v - κ_p \textit{Id}_{v^\perp}) \leq 1$ for each unit vector $v \in T_pM$. Our main theorem classifies the almost isotropic simply connected Kähler manifolds, proving that those of dimension $d=2n \geq 4$ are either isometric to complex projective space or complex hyperbolic space or are totally geodesically foliated by leaves isometric to $\mathbf{C}^{n-1}.$
Let X be a smooth projective surface of irregularity 0. The Hilbert scheme of n points on X parameterizes zero-dimensional subschemes of X of length n. In this paper, we discuss general methods for studying the cone of ample divisors on the Hilbert scheme. We then use these techniques to compute the cone of ample divisors on the Hilbert scheme for several surfaces where the cone was previously unknown. Our examples include families of surfaces of general type and del Pezzo surfaces of degree 1. The methods rely on Bridgeland stability and the Positivity Lemma of Bayer and Macri.
We study wall crossings in Bridgeland stability for the Hilbert scheme of elliptic quartic curves in three dimensional projective space. We provide a geometric description of each of the moduli spaces we encounter, including when the second component of this Hilbert scheme appears. Along the way, we prove that the principal component of this Hilbert scheme is a double blow up with smooth centers of a Grassmannian, exhibiting a completely different proof of this known result by Avritzer and Vainsencher. This description allows us to compute the cone of effective divisors of this component.
We show the existence of Bridgeland stability conditions on all Fano threefolds, by proving a modified version of a conjecture by Bayer, Toda, and the second author. The key technical ingredient is a strong Bogomolov inequality, proved recently by Chunyi Li. Additionally, we prove the original conjecture for some toric threefolds by using the toric Frobenius morphism.
We construct examples of complete Riemannian manifolds having the property that every geodesic lies in a totally geodesic hyperbolic plane. Despite the abundance of totally geodesic hyperbolic planes, these examples are not locally homogenous.
We discuss the rigidity (or lack thereof) imposed by different notions of having an abundance of zero curvature planes on a complete Riemannian 3-manifold. We prove a rank rigidity theorem for complete 3-manifolds, showing that having higher rank is equivalent to having reducible universal covering. We also study 3-manifolds such that every tangent vector is contained in a flat plane, including examples with irreducible universal covering, and discuss the effect of finite volume and real-analiticity assumptions.
We give a counterexample to the generalized Bogomolov-Gieseker inequality for threefolds conjectured by Bayer, Macrì and Toda using the blow up of a point over three dimensional projective space.
We classify all Q-factorializations of (co)minuscule Schubert varieties by using their Mori dream space structure. As a corollary we obtain a description of all IH-small resolutions of (co)minuscule Schubert varieties generalizing results of Perrin. We improve his results by including algebraically closed fields of positive characteristic and cominuscule Schubert varieties. Moreover, the use of Q-factorializations and Mori dream spaces simplifies the arguments substantially.
We consider properly discontinuous, isometric, convex cocompact actions of surface groups on a CAT(-1) space. We show that the limit set of such an action, equipped with the canonical visual metric, is a (weak) quasicircle in the sense of Falconer and Marsh. It follows that the visual metrics on such limit sets are classified, up to bi-Lipschitz equivalence, by their Hausdorff dimension. This result applies in particular to boundaries at infinity of the universal cover of a locally CAT(-1) surface. We show that any two periodic CAT(-1) metrics on $\mathbb H^2$ can be scaled so as to be almost-isometric (though in general, no equivariant almost-isometry exists). We also construct, on each higher genus surface, $k$-dimensional families of equal area Riemannian metrics, with the property that their lifts to the universal covers are pairwise almost-isometric but are not isometric to each other. Finally, we exhibit a gap phenomenon for the optimal multiplicative constant for a quasi-isometry between periodic CAT(-1) metrics on $\mathbb H^2$.
Rigidity results are obtained for Riemannian $d$-manifolds with $\sec \geqslant 1$ and spherical rank at least $d-2>0$. Conjecturally, all such manifolds are locally isometric to a round sphere or complex projective space with the (symmetric) Fubini--Study metric. This conjecture is verified in all odd dimensions, for metrics on $d$-spheres when $d \neq 6$, for Riemannian manifolds satisfying the Rakić duality principle, and for Kählerian manifolds.
Almost-isometries are quasi-isometries with multiplicative constant one. Lifting a pair of metrics on a compact space gives quasi-isometric metrics on the universal cover. Under some additional hypotheses on the metrics, we show that there is no almost-isometry between the universal covers. We show that Riemannian manifolds which are almost-isometric have the same volume growth entropy. We establish various rigidity results as applications.
We prove a generalized Bogomolov-Gieseker inequality as conjectured by Bayer, Macrì and Toda for the smooth quadric threefold. This implies the existence of a family of Bridgeland stability conditions.
Given a connected, compact, totally geodesic submanifold Y^m of noncompact type inside a compact locally symmetric space of noncompact type X^n, we provide a sufficient condition that ensures that [Y^m] is nonzero in H_m(X^n; R); in low dimensions, our condition is also necessary. We provide conditions under which there exist a tangential map of pairs from a finite cover (X-bar,Y-bar) to the nonnegatively curved duals (X_u,Y_u).