Non-commutative varieties with curvature having bounded signature

Abstract

A natural notion for the signature $C_{\pm}({\mathcal V}(p))$ of the curvature of the zero set ${\mathcal V}(p)$ of a non-commutative polynomial $p$ is introduced. The main result of this paper is the bound \[ \operatorname{deg} p \leq2 C_\pm \bigl({\mathcal V}(p) \bigr) + 2. \] It is obtained under some irreducibility and nonsingularity conditions, and shows that the signature of the curvature of the zero set of $p$ dominates its degree. The condition $C_+({\mathcal V}(p))=0$ means that the non-commutative variety ${\mathcal V}(p)$ has positive curvature. In this case, the preceding inequality implies that the degree of $p$ is at most two. Non-commutative varieties ${\mathcal V}(p)$ with positive curvature were introduced in Indiana Univ. Math. J. 56 (2007) 1189-1231). There a slightly weaker irreducibility hypothesis plus a number of additional hypotheses yielded a weaker result on $p$. The approach here is quite different; it is cleaner, and allows for the treatment of arbitrary signatures. In J. Anal. Math. 108 (2009) 19-59), the degree of a non-commutative polynomial $p$ was bounded by twice the signature of its Hessian plus two. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of this non-commutative Hessian of $p$ which turns out to be very appropriate for analyzing the variety ${\mathcal V}(p)$.