Orbit closures and rational surfaces

Abstract

In this paper we study the Grassmannian of submodules of a given dimension inside a finitely generated projective module $P$ for a finite dimensional algebra $\Lambda$ over an algebraically closed field. The orbit of such a submodule $C$ under the action of $\mathrm{Aut}_\Lambda ( P )$ on the Grassmannian encodes information on the degenerations of $P/C$ and has been considered by a number of authors. The goal of this article is to bound the geometry of two-dimensional orbit closures in terms of representation-theoretic data. Several examples are given to illustrate the interplay between the geometry of the projective surfaces which arise and the corresponding posets of degenerations.