For a local complete intersection morphism, we establish fiberwise denseness in the $n$-dimensional irreducible components of the compactification Nisnevich locally.
We give a summary of joint work with Michael Thaddeus that realizes toroidal compactifcations of split reductive groups as moduli spaces of framed bundles on chains of rational curves. We include an extension of this work that covers Artin stacks wit
h good moduli spaces. We discuss, for complex groups, the symplectic counterpart of these compactifications, and conclude with some open problems about the moduli problem concerned.
In this work, we present a generalization to varieties and sheaves of the fundamental ideal of the Witt ring of a field by defining a sheaf of fundamental ideals $tilde{I}$ and a sheaf of Witt rings $tilde{W}$ in the obvious way. The Milnor conjectur
e then relates the associated graded of $tilde{W}$ to Milnor K-theory and so allows the classical invariants of a bilinear space over a field to be extended to our setting using etale cohomology. As an application of these results, we calculate the Witt ring of a smooth curve with good reduction over a non-dyadic local field.
Consider a simple algebraic group G of adjoint type, and its wonderful compactification X. We show that X admits a unique family of minimal rational curves, and we explicitly describe the subfamily consisting of curves through a general point. As an
application, we show that X has the target rigidity property when G is not of type A_1 or C.
For a complex connected semisimple linear algebraic group G of adjoint type and of rank n, De Concini and Procesi constructed its wonderful compactification bar{G}, which is a smooth Fano G times G-variety of Picard number n enjoying many interesting
properties. In this paper, it is shown that the wonderful compactification bar{G} is rigid under Fano deformations. Namely, for any family of smooth Fano varieties over a connected base, if one fiber is isomorphic to bar{G}, then so are all other fibers.