Grassmannian twists, derived equivalences and brane transport

Abstract: This note is based on a talk given at String-Math 2012 in Bonn, on a joint paper with Ed Segal. We exhibit derived equivalences corresponding to certain Grassmannian flops. The construction of these equivalences is inspired by work of Herbst-Hori-Page on brane transport for gauged linear sigma models: in particular, we define 'windows' corresponding to their grade restriction rules. We then show how composing our equivalences produces interesting autoequivalences, which we describe as twists and cotwists about certain spherical functors. Our proofs use natural long exact sequences of bundles on Grassmannians known as twisted Lascoux complexes, or staircase complexes. We give a compact description of these. We also touch on some related developments, and work through some extended examples.