Shimura curves on Shimura surfaces have been a candidate for counterexamples to the bounded negativity conjecture. We prove that they do not serve this purpose: there are only finitely many whose self-intersection number lies below a given bound. Previously, this result has been shown in [BHK+13] for compact Hilbert modular surfaces using the Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality. Our approach uses equidistribution and works uniformly for all Shimura surfaces.
Let $X$ be a smooth complex projective variety. In 2002, Bridgeland defined a notion of stability for the objects in $D^b(X)$, the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on $X$, which generalized the notion of slope stability for vector bundles on curves. There are many nice connections between stability conditions on $X$ and the geometry of the variety. We construct new stability conditions for surfaces containing a curve $C$ whose self-intersection is negative. We show that these stability conditions lie on a wall of the geometric chamber of ${rm Stab}(X)$, the stability manifold of $X$. We then construct the moduli space $M_{sigma}(mathcal{O}_X)$ of $sigma$-semistable objects of class $[mathcal{O}_X]$ in $K_0(X)$ after wall-crossing.
We prove that a Shimura curve in the Siegel modular variety is not generically contained in the open Torelli locus as long as the rank of unitary part in its canonical Higgs bundle satisfies a numerical upper bound. As an application we show that the Coleman-Oort conjecture holds for Shimura curves associated to partial corestriction upon a suitable choice of parameters, which generalizes a construction due to Mumford.
By constructing suitable Borcherds forms on Shimura curves and using Schofers formula for norms of values of Borcherds forms at CM-points, we determine all the equations of hyperelliptic Shimura curves $X_0^D(N)$. As a byproduct, we also address the problem of whether a modular form on Shimura curves $X_0^D(N)/W_{D,N}$ with a divisor supported on CM-divisors can be realized as a Borcherds form, where $X_0^D(N)/W_{D,N}$ denotes the quotient of $X_0^D(N)$ by all the Atkin-Lehner involutions. The construction of Borcherds forms is done by solving certain integer programming problems.
There are no known failures of Bounded Negativity in characteristic 0. In the light of recent work showing the Bounded Negativity Conjecture fails in positive characteristics for rational surfaces, we propose new characteristic free conjectures as a replacement. We also develop bounds on numerical characteristics of curves constraining their negativity. For example, we show that the $H$-constant of a rational curve $C$ with at most $9$ singular points satisfies $H(C)>-2$ regardless of the characteristic.
We provide a lower bound on the degree of curves of the projective plane $mathbb{P}^2$ passing through the centers of a divisorial valuation $ u$ of $mathbb{P}^2$ with prescribed multiplicities, and an upper bound for the Seshadri-type constant of $ u$, $hat{mu}( u)$, constant that is crucial in the Nagata-type valuative conjecture. We also give some results related to the bounded negativity conjecture concerning those rational surfaces having the projective plane as a relatively minimal model.