arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to P. E. Newstead.
Our purpose in this paper is to construct new examples of twisted Brill Noether loci on curves of genus g greater than 2 with negative expected dimension. We begin by completing the proof of Butler's conjecture for coherent systems of certain type establishing the birationality, smoothness, and irreducibility of the corresponding loci. We also produce new points on the BN map.
Our purpose in this paper is to construct new examples of twisted Brill-Noether loci on curves of genus $g\ge2$. Many of these examples have negative expected dimension. We deduce also the existence of a new region in the Brill-Noether map, whose points support non-empty standard Brill-Noether loci.
Let $C$ be a smooth irreducible complex projective curve of genus $g \geq 2$ and $M$ the moduli space of stable vector bundles on $C$ of rank $n$ and degree $d$ with $\gcd(n,d)=1$. A generalised Picard sheaf is the direct image on $M$ of the tensor product of a universal bundle on $M\times C$ by the pullback of a vector bundle $E_0$ on $C$. In this paper, we investigate the stability of generalised Picard sheaves and, in the case where these are locally free, their deformations. When $g\ge3$, $n\ge2$ (with some additional restrictions for $g=3,4$) and the rank and degree of $E_0$ are coprime, this leads to the construction of a fine moduli space for deformations of Picard bundles.
It is well known that there are no stable bundles of rank greater than 1 on the projective line. In this paper, our main purpose is to study the existence problem for stable coherent systems on the projective line when the number of sections is larger than the rank. We include a review of known results, mostly for a small number of sections.
We study Higgs bundles over an elliptic curve with complex reductive structure group, describing the (normalization of) its moduli spaces and the associated Hitchin fibration. The case of trivial degree is covered by the work of Thaddeus in 2001. Our arguments are different from those of Thaddeus and cover arbitrary degree.
We study topologically trivial $G$-Higgs bundles over an elliptic curve $X$ when the structure group $G$ is a connected real form of a complex semisimple Lie group $G^{\mathbb{C}}$. We achieve a description of their (reduced) moduli space, the associated Hitchin fibration and the finite morphism to the moduli space of $G^{\mathbb{C}}$-Higgs bundles.
Higher rank Brill-Noether theory for genus 6 is especially interesting as, even in the general case, some unexpected phenomena arise which are absent in lower genus. Moreover, it is the first case for which there exist curves of Clifford dimension greater than 1 (smooth plane quintics). In all cases, we obtain new upper bounds for non-emptiness of Brill-Noether loci and construct many examples which approach these upper bounds more closely than those that are well known. Some of our examples of non-empty Brill-Noether loci have negative Brill-Noether numbers.
Let $(E,V)$ be a general generated coherent system of type $(n,d,n+m)$ on a general non-singular irreducible complex projective curve. A conjecture of D. C. Butler relates the semistability of $E$ to the semistability of the kernel of the evaluation map $V\otimes \mathcal{O}_X\to E$. The aim of this paper is to obtain results on the existence of generated coherent systems and use them to prove Butler's Conjecture in some cases. The strongest results are obtained for type $(2,d,4)$, which is the first previously unknown case.
Higher rank Brill-Noether theory is completely known for curves of genus $\leq 3$. In this paper, we investigate the theory for curves of genus 4. Some of our results apply to curves of arbitrary genus.
In this paper, we consider higher rank Brill-Noether theory for smooth curves of genus 5, obtaining new upper bounds for non-emptiness of Brill-Noether loci and many new examples.
Let $C$ be a smooth projective complex curve of genus $g \geq 2$. We investigate the Brill-Noether locus consisting of stable bundles of rank 2 and determinant $L$ of odd degree $d$ having at least $k$ independent sections. This locus possesses a virtual fundamental class. We show that in many cases this class is non-zero, which implies that the Brill-Noether locus is non-empty. For many values of $d$ and $k$ the result is best possible. We obtain more precise results for $k\le5$. An appendix contains the proof of a combinatorial lemma which we need.
Let $C$ be a smooth irreducible projective curve of genus $g$ and $L$ a line bundle of degree $d$ generated by a linear subspace $V$ of $H^0(L)$ of dimension $n+1$. We prove a conjecture of D. C. Butler on the semistability of the kernel of the evaluation map $V\otimes{\mathcal O}_C\to L$ and obtain new results on the stability of this kernel. The natural context for this problem is the theory of coherent systems on curves and our techniques involve wall crossing formulae in this theory.
Over the past 20 years, a great deal of work has been done on the moduli spaces of coherent systems on algebraic curves. Until recently, however, there has been very little work on the fixed determinant case, except for the special case of rank 2 and canonical determinant. This situation has changed due to two papers of B. Osserman, who has obtained lower bounds for the dimensions of the fixed determinant moduli spaces in some cases. Our object in this paper is to show that some of Osserman's bounds are sharp.
In this paper, we determine bundles which compute the higher Clifford indices for trigonal curves.
Two definitions of the Clifford index for vector bundles on a smooth projective curve $C$ of genus $g\ge4$ were introduced in a previous paper by the authors. In another paper the authors obtained results on one of these indices for bundles of rank 3. In this paper we extend these results in the case where $C$ has classical Clifford index 3. In particular we prove Mercat's conjecture for bundles of rank 3 for $g \leq 8$ and $g \geq 13$ when $C$ has classical Clifford index 3. We obtain complete results in the case of genus 7.
In this paper we study $G$-Higgs bundles over an elliptic curve when the structure group $G$ is a classical complex reductive Lie group. Modifying the notion of family, we define a new moduli problem for the classification of semistable $G$-Higgs bundles of a given topological type over an elliptic curve and we give an explicit description of the associated moduli space as a finite quotient of a product of copies of the cotangent bundle of the elliptic curve. We construct a bijective morphism from this new moduli space to the usual moduli space of semistable $G$-Higgs bundles, proving that the former is the normalization of the latter. We also obtain an explicit description of the Hitchin fibration for our (new) moduli space of $G$-Higgs bundles and we study the generic and non-generic fibres.
Let $C$ be a smooth irreducible projective algebraic curve defined over the complex numbers. The notion of the Clifford index of $C$ was extended a few years ago to semistable bundles of any rank. Recent work has been focussed mainly on the rank-2 Clifford index, although interesting results have also been obtained for the case of rank 3. In this paper we extend this work, obtaining improved lower bounds for the rank-3 Clifford index. This allows the first computations of the rank-3 index in non-trivial cases and examples for which the rank-3 index is greater than the rank-2 index.
Clifford indices of vector bundles on algebraic curves were introduced in a previous paper of the authors. In this paper we study bundles of rank 2 which compute these Clifford indices. This is of particular interest in the light of recently discovered counterexamples to a conjecture of Mercat.