A Brill-Noether theorem for curves of a fixed gonality

Seminar: 
Algebraic and Tropical Geometry
Event time: 
Thursday, January 19, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm
Location: 
431 DL
Speaker: 
Dhruv Ranganathan
Speaker affiliation: 
MIT
Event description: 

The Brill–Noether varieties of a curve C parametrize embeddings of C of prescribed degree into a projective space of prescribed dimension. When C is general in moduli, these varieties are well understood: they are smooth, irreducible, and have the “expected dimension. As one ventures deeper into the moduli space of curves, past the locus of general curves, these varieties exhibit intricate, even pathological, behaviour: they can be highly singular and their dimensions are unknown. A first measure of the failure of a curve to be general is its gonality. I will present a generalization of the Brill–Noether theorem, which determines the dimensions of the Brill–Noether varieties on a general curve of fixed gonality, i.e. “general inside a chosen special locus. The proof blends a study of Berkovich skeletons of maps from curves to toric varieties with tropical linear series theory. The deformation theory of logarithmic stable maps acts as the bridge between these ideas. This is joint work with Dave Jensen, building on prior results of Nathan Pflueger.