Gröbner cells of punctual Hilbert schemes in dimension two

Abstract: We begin with a comprehensive discussion of the punctual Hilbert scheme of the regular two-dimensional local ring in terms of the Gr\"obner cells. These schemes are the most degenerate fibers of the Grothendieck-Deligne norm map (the Hilbert-Chow morphism), playing an important role in the study of Hilbert schemes of smooth surfaces. They are generally singular, but their Gr\"obner cells are affine spaces; they admit an explicit parametrization due to Conca and Valla. We use this to obtain the Gr\"obner decomposition of compactified Jacobians of plane curve singularities, which is non-trivial even for the generalized Jacobians (principal ideals only). One of the application is the topological invariance of certain variants of compactified Jacobians and the corresponding motivic superpolynomials for analytic deformations of quasi-homogenous plane curve singularities and some similar families.