The notion of ampleness captures essential properties of projective spaces over fields. It is natural to ask whether any sufficiently ample strongly minimal set arises from an algebraically closed field. In this talk I will explain the question and present recent results on ample strongly minimal structures.

Any algebraic stack X can be represented by a groupoid object in the category of schemes: that is, a pair of schemes Ob, Mor and morphisms source, target: Mor → Ob, inversion: Mor → Mor, composition: Mor ×_{Ob} Mor → Mor and identity: Ob → Mor that satisfy certain axioms. Yet this description of the stack X might be misleading. Namely, given a field F which is not algebraically closed, we have a natural functor between the groupoid (Ob(F),Mor(F)) and the groupoid X(F). While this functor is fully faithful, it […]

Based on mirror symmetry considerations, Hausel and Thaddeus conjectured an equality between `stringy' Hodge numbers for moduli spaces of SL_n/PGL_n Higgs bundles. With Michael Groechenig and Paul Ziegler we prove this conjecture using non-archimedean integrals on these moduli spaces, building on work of Denef-Loeser and Batyrev. Similar ideas also lead to a new proof of the geometric stabilization theorem for anisotropic Hitchin fibers, a key ingredient in the proof of the fundamental lemma by Ngô.In my talk I will outline the main arguments of the proofs and discuss the adjustments […]