Derived categories of cyclic covers and their branch divisors (Q508428)

This paper studies semi-orthogonal decompositions of derived categories of coherent sheaves arising from a cyclic cover \(f:X \to Y\) of an algebraic variety \(Y\) with a rectangular Lefschetz decomposition. A rectangular Lefschetz decomposition for \(Y\) means a semi-orthogonal decomposition \(D^b(Y) = \langle \mathcal{B},\mathcal{B}(1),\ldots,\mathcal{B}(m-1) \rangle\), where \(\mathcal{B}\) is an admissible subcategory and \(\mathcal{B}(i) := \mathcal{B}\otimes\mathcal{O}_Y(i)\). The derived category \(D^b(X)\) has a semi-orthogonal decomposition \(D^b(X) = \langle \mathcal{A}_X, \mathcal{B}_X,\mathcal{B}_X(1),\ldots \rangle\) with \(\mathcal{B}_X:=f^*\mathcal{B}\). Assuming that the cyclic cover \(X \to Y\) is degree \(n\) and ramified over a divisor \(Z \subset Y\), we also have a semi-orthogonal decomposition \(D^b(Z) = \langle \mathcal{A}_Z, \mathcal{B}_Z,\mathcal{B}_Z(1),\ldots \rangle\). The subcategories \(\mathcal{A}_X\) and \(\mathcal{A}_Z\) can be seen as ``reminders'' out of copies of \(\mathcal{B}(i)\)'s. The main result of this paper is the following relation between \(\mathcal{A}_X\) and \(\mathcal{A}_Z\). Denote by \(\mu_n\) the group of \(n\)-th roots of unity, which naturally acts on \(X\). There are fully faithful functors \(\Phi_k:\mathcal{A}_Z \to \mathcal{A}_X^{\mu_n}\) for \(0 \leq k \leq n-2\) such that there is a semi-orthogonal decomposition \(\mathcal{A}_X^{\mu_n}=\langle \Phi_0(\mathcal{A}_Z),\ldots, \Phi_{n-2}(\mathcal{A}_Z) \rangle\). Preliminary sections 2 and 3 offer a compact recollections on semi-orthogonal decompositions and equivariant categories. Sections 4 and 5 apply these preliminaries to the cyclic covering considered, and constructs the semi-orthogonal decompositions of \(D^b(X)\) and \(D^b(Z)\) mentioned above. The main result is proved in \S6. The strategy is in a sense standard, using the method of mutations, although the proof is based on the careful arguments given in previous sections. The final section \S7 studies the functor \(\Phi_0\) and its relation to the rotation functor. The reviewer would like to comment that this paper is self-contained and gives careful arguments on the equivariant derived categories. A reader interested in derived categories under equivariant setting will find much benefits in this paper.