No Arabic abstract
We compute and compare the (intersection) cohomology of various natural geometric compactifications of the moduli space of cubic threefolds: the GIT compactification and its Kirwan blowup, as well as the Baily-Borel and toroidal compactifications of the ball quotient model, due to Allcock-Carlson-Toledo. Our starting point is Kirwans method. We then follow by investigating the behavior of the cohomology under the birational maps relating the various models, using the decomposition theorem in different ways, and via a detailed study of the boundary of the ball quotient model. As an easy illustration of our methods, the simpler case of the moduli of cubic surfaces is discussed in an appendix.
A conjectural recursive relation for the Poincare polynomial of the Hitchin moduli space is derived from wallcrossing in the refined local Donaldson-Thomas theory of a curve. A doubly refined generalization of this theory is also conjectured and shown to similarly determine the Hodge polynomial of the same moduli space.
We give a characterizaton of smooth ample Hypersurfaces in Abelian Varieties and also describe an irreducible connected component of their moduli space: it consists of the Hypersurfaces of a given polarization type, plus the iterated univariate coverings of normal type (of the same polarization type). The above manifolds yield also a connected component of the open set of Teichmuller space consisting of Kahler complex structures.
In this note we initiate a program to obtain global descriptions of Calabi-Yau moduli spaces, to calculate their Picard group, and to identify within that group the Hodge line bundle, and the closely-related Bagger-Witten line bundle. We do this here for several Calabi-Yaus obtained in [DW09] as crepant resolutions of the orbifold quotient of the product of three elliptic curves. In particular we verify in these cases a recent claim of [GHKSST16] by noting that a power of the Hodge line bundle is trivial -- even though in most of these cases the Picard group is infinite.
We determine the Cox rings of the minimal resolutions of cubic surfaces with at most rational double points, of blow ups of the projective plane at non-general configurations of six points and of three dimensional smooth Fano varieties of Picard numbers one and two.
We show the cohomological monodromy for the universal family of smooth cubic threefolds does not factor through the genus five mapping class group. This gives a geometric group theory perspective on the well-known irrationality of cubic threefolds.