New characterizations of plurisubharmonic functions and positivity of direct image sheaves

Abstract: We give new characterizations of plurisubharmonic functions and Griffiths positivity of holomorphic vector bundles with singular Finsler metrics. As applications, we present a different method to prove plurisubharmonic variation of generalized Bergman kernel metrics and Griffiths positivity of the direct images of twisted relative canonical bundles associated to holomorphic families of K\"ahler manifolds.