Components and singularities of Quot schemes and varieties of commuting matrices (Q2151193)

The aim of this paper is to investigate components and singularities of Quot schemes and varieties of commuting matrices. The authors classify its components for any number of matrices of size at most \(7\). They prove that starting from quadruples of \(8\times 8\) matrices, this scheme has generically non reduced components, while up to degree \(7\) it is generically reduced. Their approach is to recast the problem as deformations of modules and generalize an array of methods: apolarity, duality and Bialynicki-Birula decompositions to this setup. The authors include a thorough review of their methods to make the paper self-contained and accessible to both algebraic and linear-algebraic communities. The results obtained in this paper give the corresponding statements for the Quot schemes of points, in particular the authors classify the components of Quot\(_d(\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{A}^n}^{\oplus r})\) for \(d\leq7\) and all \(r,n\). This paper is organized as follows. The first Section is an introduction to the subject and statement of the results. Section 2 deals with notation and Section 3 with some preliminaries. Section 4 concerns structural results on the variety \(C_n(\mathbf{M}_d)\) of \(n\)-tuples of commuting \(d\times d\) matrices and Quot\(^d_r\). Section 5 is devoted to Bialynicki-Birula decompositions and components of Quot\(^d_r\) and Section 6 to some results specific for degree at most eight. The paper is supported by an appendix concerning a functorial approach to comparison between \(C_n(\mathbf{M}_d)\) and Quot\(^d_r\).