Characterizing volume via cone duality

Abstract

For divisors over smooth projective varieties, we show that the volume can be characterized by the duality between pseudo-effective cone of divisors and movable cone of curves. Inspired by this result, we give and study a natural intersection-theoretic volume functional for 1-cycles over compact K\"ahler manifolds. In particular, for numerical equivalence classes of curves over projective varieties, it is closely related to the mobility functional.