We give a presentation of the moduli stack of toric vector bundles with fixed equivariant total Chern class as a quotient of a fine moduli scheme of framed bundles by a linear group action. This fine moduli scheme is described explicitly as a locally closed subscheme of a product of partial flag varieties cut out by combinatorially specified rank conditions. We use this description to show that the moduli of rank three toric vector bundles satisfy Murphy’s law, in the sense of Vakil. The preliminary sections of the paper give a self-contained introduction to Klyachko’s classification of toric vector bundles.

We continue the study, begun in [F. Russo, Varieties with quadratic entry locus. I, Preprint (2006), math. AG/0701889] , of secant defective manifolds having ‘simple entry loci’. We prove that such manifolds are rational and describe them in terms of tangential projections. Using also the work of [P. Ionescu and F. Russo, Conic-connected manifolds, Preprint (2006), math. AG/0701885], their classification is reduced to the case of Fano manifolds of high index, whose Picard group is generated by the hyperplane section class. Conjecturally, the former should be linear sections of rational homogeneous manifolds. We also provide evidence that the classification of linearly normal dual defective manifolds with Picard group generated by the hyperplane section should follow along the same lines.

The description of irreducible representations of a group G can be seen as a problem in harmonic analysis; namely, decomposing a suitable space of functions on G into irreducibles for the action of G×G by left and right multiplication. For a split p-adic reductive group G over a local non-archimedean field, unramified irreducible smooth representations are in bijection with semisimple conjugacy classes in the ‘Langlands dual’ group. We generalize this description to an arbitrary spherical variety X of G as follows. Irreducible unramified quotients of the space are in natural ‘almost bijection’ with a number of copies of AX*/WX, the quotient of a complex torus by the ‘little Weyl group’ of X. This leads to a description of the Hecke module of unramified vectors (a weak analog of geometric results of Gaitsgory and Nadler), and an understanding of the phenomenon that representations ‘distinguished’ by certain subgroups are functorial lifts. In the course of the proof, rationality properties of spherical varieties are examined and a new interpretation is given for the action, defined by Knop, of the Weyl group on the set of Borel orbits.

We generalize Gaeta’s theorem to the family of determinantal schemes. In other words, we show that the schemes defined by minors of a fixed size of a matrix with polynomial entries belong to the same G-biliaison class of a complete intersection whenever they have maximal possible codimension, given the size of the matrix and of the minors that define them.

We introduce the notion of an alternate product of Frobenius manifolds and we give, after Ciocan-Fontanine et al., an interpretation of the Frobenius manifold structure canonically attached to the quantum cohomology of G(r,n+1) in terms of alternate products. We also investigate the relationship with the alternate Thom–Sebastiani product of Laurent polynomials.