No Arabic abstract
A well-known conjecture of Orlov asks whether the existence of a full exceptional collection implies rationality of the underlying variety. We prove this conjecture for arithmetic toric varieties over general fields. We also investigate a slight generalization of this conjecture, where the endomorphism algebras of the exceptional objects are allowed to be separable field extensions of the base field. We show this generalization is false by exhibiting a geometrically rational, smooth, projective threefold over the the field of rational numbers that possesses a full etale-exceptional collection but not a rational point. The counterexample comes from twisting a non-retract rational variety with a rational point and full etale-exceptional collection by a torsor that is invisible to Brauer invariants. Along the way, we develop some tools for linearizing objects, including a group that controls linearizations.
We construct an exceptional collection $Upsilon$ of maximal possible length 6 on any of the Burniat surfaces with $K_X^2=6$, a 4-dimensional family of surfaces of general type with $p_g=q=0$. We also calculate the DG algebra of endomorphisms of this collection and show that the subcategory generated by this collection is the same for all Burniat surfaces. The semiorthogonal complement $mathcal A$ of $Upsilon$ is an almost phantom category: it has trivial Hochschild homology, and $K_0(mathcal A)=bZ_2^6$.
A powerful tool of investigation of Fano varieties is provided by exceptional collections in their derived categories. Proving the fullness of such a collection is generally a nontrvial problem, usually solved on a case-by-case basis, with the aid of a deep understanding of the underlying geometry. Likewise, when an exceptional collection is not full, it is not straightforward to determine whether its residual category, i.e., its right orthogonal, is the derived category of a variety. We show how one can use the existence of Bridgeland stability condition these residual categories (when they exist) to address these problems. We examine a simple case in detail: the quadric threefold $Q_3$ in $mathbb{P}^{4}$. We also give an indication how a variety of other classical results could be justified or re-discovered via this technique., e.g., the commutativity of the Kuznetsov component of the Fano threefold $Y_4$.
In this paper, we study derived categories of certain toric varieties with Picard number three that are blowing-up another toric varieties along their torus invariant loci of codimension at most three. We construct strong full exceptional collections by using Orlovs blow-up formula and mutations.
Supersymmetric D-branes supported on the complex two-dimensional base $S$ of the local Calabi-Yau threefold $K_S$ are described by semi-stable coherent sheaves on $S$. Under suitable conditions, the BPS indices counting these objects (known as generalized Donaldson-Thomas invariants) coincide with the Vafa-Witten invariants of $S$ (which encode the Betti numbers of the moduli space of semi-stable sheaves). For surfaces which admit a strong collection of exceptional sheaves, we develop a general method for computing these invariants by exploiting the isomorphism between the derived category of coherent sheaves and the derived category of representations of a suitable quiver with potential $(Q,W)$ constructed from the exceptional collection. We spell out the dictionary between the Chern class $gamma$ and polarization $J$ on $S$ vs. the dimension vector $vec N$ and stability parameters $veczeta$ on the quiver side. For all examples that we consider, which include all del Pezzo and Hirzebruch surfaces, we find that the BPS indices $Omega_star(gamma)$ at the attractor point (or self-stability condition) vanish, except for dimension vectors corresponding to simple representations and pure D0-branes. This opens up the possibility to compute the BPS indices in any chamber using either the flow tree or the Coulomb branch formula. In all cases we find precise agreement with independent computations of Vafa-Witten invariants based on wall-crossing and blow-up formulae. This agreement suggests that i) generating functions of DT invariants for a large class of quivers coming from strong exceptional collections are mock modular functions of higher depth and ii) non-trivial single-centered black holes and scaling solutions do not exist quantum mechanically in such local Calabi-Yau geometries.
Our main goal is to give a sense of recent developments in the (stable) rationality problem from the point of view of unramified cohomology and 0-cycles as well as derived categories and semiorthogonal decompositions, and how these perspectives intertwine and reflect each other. In particular, in the case of algebraic surfaces, we explain the relationship between Blochs conjecture, Chow-theoretic decompositions of the diagonal, categorical representability, and the existence of phantom subcategories of the derived category.