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

The Milnor class is a generalization of the Milnor number, defined as the difference (up to sign) of Chern--Schwartz--MacPherson's class and Fulton--Johnson's canonical Chern class of a local complete intersection variety in a smooth variety. In this paper we introduce a "motivic" Grothendieck group $K^{\mathcal Prop}_{\ell.c.i}(\mathcal V/X \to S)$ and natural transformations from this Grothendieck group to the homology theory. We capture the Milnor class, more generally Hir...

The relative Grothendieck group $K_0(\m V/X)$ is the free abelian group generated by the isomorphism classes of complex algebraic varieties over $X$ modulo the "scissor relation". The motivic Hirzebruch class ${T_y}_*: K_0(\m V /X) \to H_*^{BM}(X) \otimes \bQ[y]$ is a unique natural transformation satisfying that for a nonsingular variety $X$ the value ${T_y}_*([X \xrightarrow {\op {id}_X} X])$ of the isomorphism class of the identity $X \xrightarrow {id_X} X$ is the Poincar\...

I will discuss recent progress by many people in the program of extending natural topological invariants from manifolds to singular spaces. Intersection homology theory and mixed Hodge theory are model examples of such invariants. The past 20 years have seen a series of new invariants, partly inspired by string theory, such as motivic integration and the elliptic genus of a singular variety. These theories are not defined in a topological way, but there are intriguing hints o...

We investigate aspects of certain stringy invariants of singular elliptic fibrations which arise in engineering Grand Unified Theories in F-theory. In particular, we exploit the small resolutions of the total space of these fibrations provided recently in the physics literature to compute `stringy characteristic classes', and find that numerical invariants obtained by integrating such characteristic classes are predetermined by the topology of the base of the elliptic fibrati...

We present a formula for computing proper pushforwards of classes in the Chow ring of a projective bundle under the projection $\pi:\Pbb(\Escr)\rightarrow B$, for $B$ a non-singular compact complex algebraic variety of any dimension. Our formula readily produces generalizations of formulas derived by Sethi,Vafa, and Witten to compute the Euler characteristic of elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds used for F-theory compactifications of string vacua. The utility of such a...

Bershadsky, Cecotti, Ooguri, and Vafa constructed a real-valued invariant for Calabi--Yau manifolds, which is now called the BCOV torsion. Based on it, a metric-independent invariant, called the BCOV invariant, was constructed by Fang--Lu--Yoshikawa and Eriksson--Freixas i Montplet--Mourougane. The BCOV invariant is conjecturally related to the Gromov--Witten theory via mirror symmetry. Based upon the previous work of the second author, we prove the conjecture that birational...

A survey article for AMS Summer Institute at Seattle in 2005.

We give a short proof of the fact that the Chern classes for singular varieties defined by Marie-Helene Schwartz by means of "radial frames" agree with the functorial notion defined by Robert MacPherson.

In this work we study characteristic classes of possibly singular varieties embedded as a closed subvariety of a nonsingular variety. In special, we express the Schwartz-MacPherson class in terms of the $\mu$-class and Chern class of the sheaves of logarithmic and multi-logarithmic differential forms. As an application we show an expression for Euler characteristic of a complement of a singular variety.

Inspired by p-adic (and real) principal value integrals, we introduce motivic principal value integrals associated to multi-valued rational differential forms on smooth algebraic varieties. We investigate the natural question whether (for complete varieties) this notion is a birational invariant. The answer seems to be related to the dichotomy of the Minimal Model Program.