Compact Moduli Spaces and Vector Bundles

This book contains the proceedings of the conference on Compact Moduli and Vector Bundles, held from October 21-24, 2010, at the University of Georgia. This book is a mix of survey papers and original research articles on two related subjects: Compact Moduli spaces of algebraic varieties, including of higher-dimensional stable varieties and pairs, and Vector Bundles on such compact moduli spaces, including the conformal block bundles. These bundles originated in the 1970s in physics; the celebrated Verlinde formula computes their ranks. Among the surveys are those that examine compact moduli spaces of surfaces of general type and others that concern the GIT constructions of log canonical models of moduli of stable curves. The original research articles include, among others, papers on a formula for the Chern classes of conformal classes of conformal block bundles on the moduli spaces of stable curves, on Looijenga's conjectures, on algebraic and tropical Brill-Noether theory, on Green's conjecture, on rigid curves on moduli of curves, and on Steiner surfaces.