We develop a theory of Bridgeland stability conditions and moduli spaces of semistable objects for a family of varieties. Our approach is based on and generalizes previous work by Abramovich–Polishchuk, Kuznetsov, Lieblich, and Piyaratne–Toda. Our notion includes openness of stability, semistable reduction, a support property uniformly across the family, and boundedness of semistable objects. We show that such a structure exists whenever stability conditions are known to exist on the fibers.Our main application is the generalization of Mukai’s theory for moduli spaces of semistable sheaves on K3 surfaces to moduli spaces of Bridgeland semistable objects in the Kuznetsov component associated to a cubic fourfold. This leads to the extension of theorems by Addington–Thomas and Huybrechts on the derived category of special cubic fourfolds, to a new proof of the integral Hodge conjecture, and to the construction of an infinite series of unirational locally complete families of polarized hyperkähler manifolds of K3 type.Other applications include the deformation-invariance of Donaldson–Thomas invariants counting Bridgeland stable objects on Calabi–Yau threefolds, and a method for constructing stability conditions on threefolds via degeneration.

We study the derived categories of coherent sheaves on Gushel-Mukai varieties. In the derived category of such a variety, we isolate a special semiorthogonal component, which is a K3 or Enriques category according to whether the dimension of the variety is even or odd. We analyze the basic properties of this category using Hochschild homology, Hochschild cohomology, and the Grothendieck group.We study the K3 category of a Gushel-Mukai fourfold in more detail. Namely, we show this category is equivalent to the derived category of a K3 surface for a certain codimension 1 family of rational Gushel-Mukai fourfolds, and to the K3 category of a birational cubic fourfold for a certain codimension 3 family. The first of these results verifies a special case of a duality conjecture which we formulate. We discuss our results in the context of the rationality problem for Gushel-Mukai varieties, which was one of the main motivations for this work.

We generalize Kuznetsov's theory of homological projective duality to the setting of noncommutative algebraic geometry. Simultaneously, we develop the theory over general base schemes, and remove the usual smoothness, properness, and transversality hypotheses.

Given a variety Y with a rectangular Lefschetz decomposition of its derived category, we consider a degree n cyclic cover X → Y ramified over a divisor Z ⊂ Y . We construct semiorthogonal decompositions of D b (X) and D b (Z) with distinguished components AX and AZ, and prove the equivariant category of AX (with respect to an action of the n-th roots of unity) admits a semiorthogonal decomposition into n − 1 copies of AZ. As examples we consider quartic double solids, Gushel-Mukai varieties, and cyclic cubic hypersurfaces.