On slope unstable Fano varieties

Abstract

For Fano varieties, significant progress has been made recently in the study of $K$-stability, while the understanding of the weaker but more algebraic concept of $(-K)$-slope stability remains intricate. For instance, a conjecture attributed to Iskovskikh states that the tangent bundle of a Picard rank one Fano manifold is slope stable. Peternell-Wi\'sniewski and Hwang proved this conjecture up to dimension five in 1998, but Kanemitsu later disproved it in 2021. To address this gap in understanding, we present a method that aims to characterize the geometry associated with the maximal destabilizing sheaf of the tangent sheaf of a Fano variety. This approach utilizes modern advancements in the foliated minimal model program. In dimension two, our approach leads to a complete classification of $(-K)$-slope unstable weak del Pezzo surfaces with canonical singularities. As by-products, we provide the first conceptual proof that $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$ and $\mathbb{F}_1$ are the only $(-K)$-slope unstable nonsingular del Pezzo surfaces, recovering a classical result of Fahlaoui in 1989. We also uncover a phenomenon that does not occur for Fano manifolds: there exists a del Pezzo surface with type A singularities admitting a weak K\"ahler-Einstein metric, yet whose tangent sheaf is slope unstable.