We classify irreducible equivariant Ulrich vector bundles on isotropic Grassmannians.
IntroductionUlrich bundles were introduced in [5] in order to study Chow forms. The notion of an Ulrich module appeared much earlier in commutative algebra. Ulrich himself gave a certain sharp upper bound on the minimal number of generators for a maximal Cohen-Macaulay module module over a Cohen-Macaulay homogeneous ring. Ulrich modules are precisely those for which the upper bound is attained (see [9]). There are several equivalent definitions of Ulrich bundles. Though we are going to use a less enlightning cohomological one, it might be motivating to formulate the most geometric and, to our taste, the easiest one. Given a d-dimensional projective variety X ⊂ P N , an Ulrich bundle on X is a vector bundle E such that π * E is a trivial bundle for a general linear projection π : X → P d . Further details may be found in [5].It was asked in [5] whether every projective variety admits an Ulrich bundle. So far the answer is known in few cases which include hypersurfaces and complete intersections [7], del Pezzo surfaces [5], and abelian surfaces [1].While it is not clear whether the answer to the general question is positive, in the case of rational homogeneous varieties one has a large test class of vector bundles, namely equivariant ones. In [4] the authors fully classified irreducible equivariant Ulrich vector bundles on Grassmannians over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero. These results were further improved in [3], where most of partial flag varieties were treated. In the current paper we move in an orthogonal (or symplectic) direction and classify irreducible equivariant Ulrich bundles on isotropic Grassmannians, that is varieties of the form G/P, where G is a classical group of type B n , C n , or D n , and P is a maximal parabolic subgroup.The following meta theorem is the main result of the present paper.Theorem. The only isotropic Grassmannians admitting an equivariant irreducible Ulrich vector bundle are the symplectic Grassmannians of planes IGr(2, 2n) for n ≥ 2, odd and even-dimensional quadrics Q d , orthogonal Grassmannians of planes OGr(2, m) for m ≥ 4, even orthogonal Grassmannians of 3-spaces OGr(3, 4q + 6) for q ≥ 0, and OGr(4, 8). In each case the corresponding bundles are classified.The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we collect some preliminary definitions and provide a simple criterion for an equivariant irreducible vector bundle to be Ulrich. In Section 3 we treat all isotropic Grassmannians in type C n but maximal (Lagrangian) ones. Similarly, in sections 4 and 5 we deal with all but maximal Grassmannians in types B n and D n respectively. Finally, Section 6 is devoted to maximal Grassmannians, both symplectic and orthogonal.The author is gratful to the anonymous reviewer for careful reading of the original manuscript.