We investigate symbolic and regular powers of monomial ideals. For a square-free monomial ideal I ⊆ 𝕜[x 0, … , xn ] we show that for all positive integers m, t and r, where e is the big-height of I and . This captures two conjectures (r = 1 and r = e): one of Harbourne and Huneke, and one of Bocci et al. We also introduce the symbolic polyhedron of a monomial ideal and use this to explore symbolic powers of non-square-free monomial ideals.

We prove the KKV conjecture expressing Gromov–Witten invariants of $K3$ surfaces in terms of modular forms. Our results apply in every genus and for every curve class. The proof uses the Gromov–Witten/Pairs correspondence for $K3$ -fibered hypersurfaces of dimension 3 to reduce the KKV conjecture to statements about stable pairs on (thickenings of) $K3$ surfaces. Using degeneration arguments and new multiple cover results for stable pairs, we reduce the KKV conjecture further to the known primitive cases. Our results yield a new proof of the full Yau–Zaslow formula, establish new Gromov–Witten multiple cover formulas, and express the fiberwise Gromov–Witten partition functions of $K3$ -fibered 3-folds in terms of explicit modular forms.

The moduli space of canonical divisors (with prescribed zeros and poles) on nonsingular curves is not compact since the curve may degenerate. We define a proper moduli space of twisted canonical divisors in $\overline{{\mathcal{M}}}_{g,n}$ which includes the space of canonical divisors as an open subset. The theory leads to geometric/combinatorial constraints on the closures of the moduli spaces of canonical divisors.

In case the differentials have at least one pole (the strictly meromorphic case), the moduli spaces of twisted canonical divisors on genus $g$ curves are of pure codimension $g$ in $\overline{{\mathcal{M}}}_{g,n}$. In addition to the closure of the canonical divisors on nonsingular curves, the moduli spaces have virtual components. In the Appendix A, a complete proposal relating the sum of the fundamental classes of all components (with intrinsic multiplicities) to a formula of Pixton is proposed. The result is a precise and explicit conjecture in the tautological ring for the weighted fundamental class of the moduli spaces of twisted canonical divisors.

As a consequence of the conjecture, the classes of the closures of the moduli spaces of canonical divisors on nonsingular curves are determined (both in the holomorphic and meromorphic cases).

We consider a general fibre of given length in a generic projection of a variety. Under the assumption that the fibre is of local embedding dimension 2 or less, an assumption which can be checked in many cases, we prove that the fibre is reduced and its image on the projected variety is an ordinary multiple point.

The Severi degree is the degree of the Severi variety parametrizing plane curves of degree $d$ with ${\it\delta}$ nodes. Recently, Göttsche and Shende gave two refinements of Severi degrees, polynomials in a variable $y$, which are conjecturally equal, for large $d$. At $y=1$, one of the refinements, the relative Severi degree, specializes to the (non-relative) Severi degree. We give a tropical description of the refined Severi degrees, in terms of a refined tropical curve count for all toric surfaces. We also refine the equivalent count of floor diagrams for Hirzebruch and rational ruled surfaces. Our description implies that, for fixed ${\it\delta}$, the refined Severi degrees are polynomials in $d$ and $y$, for large $d$. As a consequence, we show that, for ${\it\delta}\leqslant 10$ and all $d\geqslant {\it\delta}/2+1$, both refinements of Göttsche and Shende agree and equal our refined counts of tropical curves and floor diagrams.

Suppose that a complex manifold M is locally embedded into a higher-dimensional neighbourhood as a submanifold. We show that, if the local neighbourhood germs are compatible in a suitable sense, then they glue together to give a global neighbourhood of M. As an application, we prove a global version of Hertling–Manin's unfolding theorem for germs of TEP structures; this has applications in the study of quantum cohomology.

The Kodaira–Thurston manifold is a quotient of a nilpotent Lie group by a cocompact lattice. We compute the family Gromov–Witten invariants which count pseudoholomorphic tori in the Kodaira–Thurston manifold. For a fixed symplectic form the Gromov–Witten invariant is trivial so we consider the twistor family of left-invariant symplectic forms which are orthogonal for some fixed metric on the Lie algebra. This family defines a loop in the space of symplectic forms. This is the first example of a genus one family Gromov–Witten computation for a non-Kähler manifold.

We give explicit formulas for the Hilbert series of residual intersections of a scheme in terms of the Hilbert series of its conormal modules. In a previous paper, we proved that such formulas should exist. We give applications to the number of equations defining projective varieties and to the dimension of secant varieties of surfaces and three-folds.

We prove a Givental-style mirror theorem for toric Deligne–Mumford stacks ${\mathcal{X}}$. This determines the genus-zero Gromov–Witten invariants of ${\mathcal{X}}$ in terms of an explicit hypergeometric function, called the $I$-function, that takes values in the Chen–Ruan orbifold cohomology of ${\mathcal{X}}$.

We present a reconstruction theorem for Fano vector bundles on projective space which recovers the small quantum cohomology for the projectivization of the bundle from a small number of low-degree Gromov-Witten invariants. We provide an extended example in which we calculate the quantum cohomology of a certain Fano 9-fold and deduce from this, using the quantum Lefschetz theorem, the quantum period sequence for a Fano 3-fold of Picard rank 2 and degree 24. This example is new, and is important for the Fanosearch program.

Consider a smooth quasi-projective variety $X$ equipped with a $\mathbb{C}^{\ast }$-action, and a regular function $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ which is $\mathbb{C}^{\ast }$-equivariant with respect to a positive weight action on the base. We prove the purity of the mixed Hodge structure and the hard Lefschetz theorem on the cohomology of the vanishing cycle complex of $f$ on proper components of the critical locus of $f$, generalizing a result of Steenbrink for isolated quasi-homogeneous singularities. Building on work by Kontsevich and Soibelman, Nagao, and Efimov, we use this result to prove the quantum positivity conjecture for cluster mutations for all quivers admitting a positively graded nondegenerate potential. We deduce quantum positivity for all quivers of rank at most 4; quivers with nondegenerate potential admitting a cut; and quivers with potential associated to triangulations of surfaces with marked points and nonempty boundary.

We show how some of the refined tropical counts of Block and Göttsche emerge from the wall-crossing formalism. This leads naturally to a definition of a class of putative $q$-deformed Gromov–Witten invariants. We prove that this coincides with another natural $q$-deformation, provided by a result of Reineke and Weist in the context of quiver representations, when the latter is well defined.

We study the possibility of constructing a Frobenius manifold for the standard Landau–Ginzburg model of odd-dimensional quadrics Q2n+1 and matching it with the Frobenius manifold attached to the quantum cohomology of these quadrics. Namely, we show that the initial conditions of the quantum cohomology Frobenius manifold of the quadric can be obtained from the suitably modified standard Landau–Ginzburg model.

We analyze the relationship between two compactifications of the moduli space of maps from curves to a Grassmannian: the Kontsevich moduli space of stable maps and the Marian–Oprea–Pandharipande moduli space of stable quotients. We construct a moduli space which dominates both the moduli space of stable maps to a Grassmannian and the moduli space of stable quotients, and equip our moduli space with a virtual fundamental class. We relate the virtual fundamental classes of all three moduli spaces using the virtual push-forward formula. This gives a new proof of a theorem of Marian–Oprea–Pandharipande: that enumerative invariants defined as intersection numbers in the stable quotient moduli space coincide with Gromov–Witten invariants.

Let $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}S$ be a complex smooth projective surface and $L$ be a line bundle on $S$. For any given collection of isolated topological or analytic singularity types, we show the number of curves in the linear system $|L|$ with prescribed singularities is a universal polynomial of Chern numbers of $L$ and $S$, assuming $L$ is sufficiently ample. More generally, we show for vector bundles of any rank and smooth varieties of any dimension, similar universal polynomials also exist and equal the number of singular subvarieties cutting out by sections of the vector bundle. This work is a generalization of Göttsche’s conjecture.

Finding the so-called characteristic numbers of the complex projective plane $ \mathbb{C} {P}^{2} $ is a classical problem of enumerative geometry posed by Zeuthen more than a century ago. For a given $d$ and $g$ one has to find the number of degree $d$ genus $g$ curves that pass through a certain generic configuration of points and at the same time are tangent to a certain generic configuration of lines. The total number of points and lines in these two configurations is $3d- 1+ g$ so that the answer is a finite integer number. In this paper we translate this classical problem to the corresponding enumerative problem of tropical geometry in the case when $g= 0$. Namely, we show that the tropical problem is well posed and establish a special case of the correspondence theorem that ensures that the corresponding tropical and classical numbers coincide. Then we use the floor diagram calculus to reduce the problem to pure combinatorics. As a consequence, we express genus 0 characteristic numbers of $ \mathbb{C} {P}^{2} $ in terms of open Hurwitz numbers.

We derive some combinatorial consequences from the positivity of Donaldson–Thomas invariants for symmetric quivers conjectured by Kontsevich and Soibelman and proved recently by Efimov. These results are used to prove the Kac conjecture for quivers having at least one loop at every vertex.

We study the stable pairs theory of local curves in 3-folds with descendent insertions. The rationality of the partition function of descendent invariants is established for the full local curve geometry (equivariant with respect to the scaling 2-torus), including relative conditions and odd-degree insertions for higher-genus curves. The capped 1-leg descendent vertex (equivariant with respect to the 3-torus) is also proven to be rational. The results are obtained by combining geometric constraints with a detailed analysis of the poles of the descendent vertex.

We give bounds for the Betti numbers of projective algebraic varieties in terms of their classes (degrees of dual varieties of successive hyperplane sections). We also give bounds for classes in terms of ramification volumes (mixed ramification degrees), sectional genus and, eventually, in terms of dimension, codimension and degree. For varieties whose degree is large with respect to codimension, we give sharp bounds for the above invariants and classify the varieties on the boundary, thus obtaining a generalization of Castelnuovo’s theory for curves to varieties of higher dimension.

In [M. Kontsevich and Y. Soibelman, Cohomological Hall algebra, exponential Hodge structures and motivic Donaldson–Thomas invariants, Preprint (2011), arXiv:1006.2706v2[math.AG]], the authors, in particular, associate to each finite quiver Q with a set of vertices I the so-called cohomological Hall algebra ℋ, which is ℤI≥0-graded. Its graded component ℋγ is defined as cohomology of the Artin moduli stack of representations with dimension vector γ. The product comes from natural correspondences which parameterize extensions of representations. In the case of a symmetric quiver, one can refine the grading to ℤI≥0×ℤ, and modify the product by a sign to get a super-commutative algebra (ℋ,⋆) (with parity induced by the ℤ-grading). It is conjectured in [M. Kontsevich and Y. Soibelman, Cohomological Hall algebra, exponential Hodge structures and motivic Donaldson–Thomas invariants, Preprint (2011), arXiv:1006.2706v2[math.AG]] that in this case the algebra (ℋ⊗ℚ,⋆) is free super-commutative generated by a ℤI≥0×ℤ-graded vector space of the form V =Vprim ⊗ℚ[x] , where x is a variable of bidegree (0,2)∈ℤI≥0×ℤ, and all the spaces ⨁ k∈ℤVprimγ,k, γ∈ℤI≥0. are finite-dimensional. In this paper we prove this conjecture (Theorem 1.1). We also prove some explicit bounds on pairs (γ,k) for which Vprimγ,k≠0 (Theorem 1.2). Passing to generating functions, we obtain the positivity result for quantum Donaldson–Thomas invariants, which was used by Mozgovoy to prove Kac’s conjecture for quivers with sufficiently many loops [S. Mozgovoy, Motivic Donaldson–Thomas invariants and Kac conjecture, Preprint (2011), arXiv:1103.2100v2[math.AG]]. Finally, we mention a connection with the paper of Reineke [M. Reineke, Degenerate cohomological Hall algebra and quantized Donaldson–Thomas invariants for m-loop quivers, Preprint (2011), arXiv:1102.3978v1[math.RT]].