Celestial integration, stringy invariants, and Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes

We introduce a notion of integration on the category of proper birational maps to a given variety $X$, with value in an associated Chow group. Applications include new birational invariants; comparison results for Chern classes and numbers of nonsingular birational varieties; `stringy' Chern classes of singular varieties; and a zeta function specializing to the topological zeta function. In its simplest manifestation, the integral gives a new expression for Chern-Schwartz-M...

Motivic integration and MacPherson's transformation are combined in this paper to construct a theory of "stringy" Chern classes for singular varieties. These classes enjoy strong birational invariance properties, and their definition encodes data coming from resolution of singularities. The singularities allowed in the theory are those typical of the minimal model program; examples are given by quotients of manifolds by finite groups. For the latter an explicit formula is pro...

These notes grew out of several introductory talks I gave during the years 2003--2005 on motivic integration. They give a short but thorough introduction to the flavor of motivic integration which nowadays goes by the name of geometric motivic integration. As an illustration of the theory some applications to birational geometry are also included.

We prove an integrality property of the Chern character with values in Chow groups. As a consequence we obtain, for a prime number p, a construction of the p-1 first homological Steenrod operations on Chow groups modulo p and p-primary torsion, over an arbitrary field. We provide applications to the study of correspondences between algebraic varieties.

By associating a `motivic integral' to every complex projective variety X with at worst canonical, Gorenstein singularities, Kontsevich proved that, when there exists a crepant resolution of singularities Y of X, the Hodge numbers of Y do not depend upon the choice of the resolution. In this article we provide an elementary introduction to the theory of motivic integration, leading to a proof of the result described above. We calculate the motivic integral of several quotient...

Let K_0(V/X) be the relative Grothendieck group of varieties over X in obj(V), with V the category of (quasi-projective) algebraic (resp. compact complex analytic) varieties over a base field k. Then we constructed the motivic Hirzebruch class transformation in the algebraic context for k of characteristic zero and in the compact complex analytic context. It unifies the well-known three characteristic class transformations of singular varieties: MacPherson's Chern class, Baum...

We define an `enriched' notion of Chow groups for algebraic varieties, agreeing with the conventional notion for complete varieties, but enjoying a functorial push-forward for arbitrary maps. This tool allows us to glue intersection-theoretic information across elements of a stratification of a variety; we illustrate this operation by giving a direct construction of Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of singular varieties, providing a new proof of an old (and long since settle...

In this paper we study some new theories of characteristic homology classes for singular complex algebraic varieties. First we introduce a natural transformation T_{y}: K_{0}(var/X) -> H_{*}(X,Q)[y] commuting with proper pushdown, which generalizes the corresponding Hirzebruch characteristic. Here K_{0}(var/X) is the relative Grothendieck group of complex algebraic varieties over X as introduced and studied by Looijenga and Bittner in relation to motivic integration. T_{y} is...

This is a note on MacPherson's Chern class for algebraic stacks, based on a previous paper of the author [arXiv:math/0407348]. We also discuss other additive characteristic classes in the same manner.

In this paper we study some new theories of characteristic homology classes for singular complex algebraic (or compactifiable analytic) spaces. We introduce a motivic Chern class transformation mC_{*}: K_{0}(var/X)-> G_{0}(X)[y], which generalizes the total \lambda-class of the cotangent bundle to singular spaces. Here K_{0}(var/X) is the relative Grothendieck group of complex algebraic varieties over X as introduced and studied by Looijenga and Bittner in relation to motivic...