Bubbling symplectic structures on moduli, a talk by Tony Pantev
I will describe a new geometric method for constructing and controlling shifted symplectic structures on the moduli of vector bundles along the fibers of a degenerating family of Calabi-Yau varieties. The method utilizes bubbling modifications of the boundaries of limiting moduli spaces to extend the symplectic structure on the general fiber to a relative symplectic structure defined on the whole family. As a proof of concept we show that this produces a universal relative symplectic structure on the moduli of Gieseker Higgs bundles along a semistable degeneration of curves. We also check that the construction works globally over the moduli stack of stable curves and show that the Hitchin map has the expected behavior in the limit. This is a joint work with Oren Ben-Bassat and Sourav Das.