arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Botong Wang.
We introduce the Bergman fan of a polymatroid and prove that the Chow ring of the Bergman fan is isomorphic to the Chow ring of the polymatroid. Using the Bergman fan, we establish the Kähler package for the Chow ring of the polymatroid, recovering and strengthening a result of Pagaria-Pezzoli.
We conjecture that any perverse sheaf on a compact aspherical Kähler manifold has non-negative Euler characteristic. This extends the Singer-Hopf conjecture in the Kähler setting. We verify the stronger conjecture when the manifold X has non-positive holomorphic bisectional curvature. We also show that the conjecture holds when X is projective and in possession of a faithful semi-simple rigid local system. The first result is proved by expressing the Euler characteristic as an intersection number involving the characteristic cycle, and then using the curvature conditions to deduce non-negativity. For the second result, we have that the local system underlies a complex variation of Hodge structure. We then deduce the desired inequality from the curvature properties of the image of the period map.
We prove a Cohen-Dimca-Orlik type theorem for rank one $\mathbb{Z}$-local systems on complex hyperplane arrangement complements. This settles a recent conjecture of S. Sugawara.
Using the Brylinski-Radon transformation, we prove that under a generic surjective linear map from C^n to C^m, the pushforward of a perverse sheaf is perverse, modulo shifts of constant sheaves.
A topological space is called self-covering if it is a nontrivial cover of itself. We prove that a closed self-covering manifold $M$ with free abelian fundamental group fibers over a circle under certain assumptions. In particular, we give a complete answer to the question whether a self-covering manifold with fundamental group $\mathbb Z$ is a fiber bundle over $S^1$, except for the $4$-dimensional smooth case. As an algebraic Hilfssatz, we develop a criterion for finite generation of modules over a commutative Noetherian ring. We also construct examples of self-covering manifolds with non-free abelian fundamental group, which are not fiber bundles over $S^1$
We survey recent applications of topology and singularity theory in the study of the algebraic complexity of concrete optimization problems in applied algebraic geometry and algebraic statistics.
The linear optimization degree gives an algebraic measure of complexity of optimizing a linear objective function over an algebraic model. Geometrically, it can be interpreted as the degree of a projection map on the {affine} conormal variety. Fixing an affine variety, our first result shows that the geometry of {this} conormal variety, expressed in terms of bidegrees, completely determines the Chern-Mather classes of the given variety. We also show that these bidegrees coincide with the linear optimization degrees of generic affine sections.
In this paper we prove a new generic vanishing theorem for $X$ a complete homogeneous variety with respect to an action of a connected algebraic group. Let $A, B_0\subset X$ be locally closed affine subvarieties, and assume that $B_0$ is smooth and pure dimensional. Let $\mathcal{P}$ be a perverse sheaf on $A$ and let $B=g B_0$ be a generic translate of $B_0$. Then our theorem implies $(-1)^{\operatorname{codim} B}χ(A\cap B, \mathcal{P}|_{A\cap B})\geq 0$. As an application, we prove in full generality a positivity conjecture about the signed Euler characteristic of generic triple intersections of Schubert cells. Such Euler characteristics are known to be the structure constants for the multiplication of the Segre-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of these Schubert cells.
In their 2012 paper, Bobadilla and Kollár studied topological conditions which guarantee that a proper map of complex algebraic varieties is a topological or differentiable fibration. They also asked whether a certain finiteness property on the relative covering space can imply that a proper map is a fibration. In this paper, we answer positively the integral homology version of their question in the case of abelian varieties, and the rational homology version in the case of compact ball quotients. We also propose several conjectures in relation to the Singer-Hopf conjecture in the complex projective setting.
Motivated by the limit mixed Hodge structure on the Milnor fiber of a hypersurface singularity germ, we construct a natural mixed Hodge structure on the torsion part of the Alexander modules of a smooth connected complex algebraic variety. More precisely, let $U$ be a smooth connected complex algebraic variety and let $f\colon U\to \mathbb{C}^*$ be an algebraic map inducing an epimorphism in fundamental groups. The pullback of the universal cover of $\mathbb{C}^*$ by $f$ gives rise to an infinite cyclic cover $U^f$ of $U$. The action of the deck group $\mathbb{Z}$ on $U^f$ induces a $\mathbb{Q}[t^{\pm 1}]$-module structure on $H_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$. We show that the torsion parts $A_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$ of the Alexander modules $H_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$ carry canonical $\mathbb{Q}$-mixed Hodge structures. We also prove that the covering map $U^f \to U$ induces a mixed Hodge structure morphism on the torsion parts of the Alexander modules. As applications, we investigate the semisimplicity of $A_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$, as well as possible weights of the constructed mixed Hodge structures. Finally, in the case when $f\colon U\to \mathbb{C}^*$ is proper, we prove the semisimplicity and purity of $A_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$, and we compare our mixed Hodge structure on $A_*(U^f;\mathbb{Q})$ with the limit mixed Hodge structure on the generic fiber of $f$.
Using compactifications in the logarithmic cotangent bundle, we obtain a formula for the Chern classes of the pushforward of Lagrangian cycles under an open embedding with normal crossing complement. This generalizes earlier results of Aluffi and Wu-Zhou. The first application of our formula is a geometric description of Chern-Mather classes of an arbitrary very affine variety, generalizing earlier results of Huh which held under the smooth and schon assumptions. As the second application, we confirm an involution formula relating sectional maximum likelihood (ML) degrees and ML bidegrees, which was conjectured by Huh and Sturmfels in 2013.
We give a framework to produce constructible functions from natural functors between categories, without need of a morphism of moduli spaces to model the functor. We show using the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence that any natural (derived) functor on constructible sheaves on smooth complex algebraic varieties can be used to construct a special kind of constructible sets, called absolute sets, generalizing a notion introduced by Simpson in presence of moduli. We conjecture that the absolute sets of local systems satisfy a "special varieties package", among which is an analog of the Manin-Mumford, Mordell-Lang, and André-Oort conjectures. The conjecture gives a simple proof of the Decomposition Theorem for all semi-simple perverse sheaves, assuming the Decomposition Theorem for the geometric ones. We prove the conjecture in the rank one case by showing that the closed absolute sets in this case are finite unions of torsion-translated affine tori. This extends a structure result of the authors for cohomology jump loci to any other natural jump loci. For example, to jump loci of intersection cohomology and Leray filtrations. We also show that the Leray spectral sequence for the open embedding in a good compactification degenerates for all rank one local systems at the usual page, not just for unitary local systems.
We study non-abelian versions of the Mellin transformations, originally introduced by Gabber-Loeser on complex affine tori. Our main result is a generalization to the non-abelian context and with arbitrary coefficients of the t-exactness of Gabber-Loeser's Mellin transformation. As an intermediate step, we obtain vanishing results for the Sabbah specialization functors. Our main application is to construct new examples of duality spaces in the sense of Bieri-Eckmann, generalizing results of Denham-Suciu.
To any complex algebraic variety endowed with a morphism to a complex affine torus we associate multivariable cohomological Alexander modules, and define natural mixed Hodge structures on their maximal Artinian submodules. The key ingredients of our construction are Gabber-Loeser's Mellin transformation and Hain-Zucker's work on unipotent variations of mixed Hodge structures. As applications, we prove the quasi-unipotence of monodromy, we obtain upper bounds on the sizes of the Jordan blocks of monodromy, and we explore the change in the Alexander modules after removing fibers of the map. We also give an example of a variety whose Alexander module has non-semisimple torsion.
We survey recent developments in the study of Hodge theoretic aspects of Alexander-type invariants associated with smooth complex algebraic varieties.
We give a complete (global) characterization of complex perverse sheaves on semi-abelian varieties in terms of their cohomology jump loci. Our results generalize Schnell's work on perverse sheaves on complex abelian varieties, as well as Gabber-Loeser's results on perverse sheaves on complex affine tori. We apply our results to the study of cohomology jump loci of smooth quasi-projective varieties, to the topology of the Albanese map, and in the context of homological duality properties of complex algebraic varieties.
We give a semi-small orthogonal decomposition of the Chow ring of a matroid M. The decomposition is used to give simple proofs of Poincaré duality, the hard Lefschetz theorem, and the Hodge-Riemann relations for the Chow ring, recovering the main result of [AHK18]. We also show that a similar semi-small orthogonal decomposition holds for the augmented Chow ring of M.
Let $X$ be a complex affine variety in $\mathbb{C}^N$, and let $f:\mathbb{C}^N\to \mathbb{C}$ be a polynomial function whose restriction to $X$ is nonconstant. For $g:\mathbb{C}^N \to \mathbb{C}$ a general linear function, we study the limiting behavior of the critical points of the one-parameter family of $f_t: =f-tg$ as $t\to 0$. Our main result gives an expression of this limit in terms of critical sets of the restrictions of $g$ to the singular strata of $(X,f)$. We apply this result in the context of optimization problems. For example, we consider nearest point problems (e.g., Euclidean distance degrees) for affine varieties and a possibly nongeneric data point.