Pathologies on the Hilbert scheme of points

Abstract

We prove that the Hilbert scheme of points on a higher dimensional affine space is non-reduced and has components lying entirely in characteristic p for all primes p. In fact, we show that Vakil's Murphy's Law holds up to retraction for this scheme. Our main tool is a generalized version of the Bialynicki-Birula decomposition.

arXiv comment24 pages, some explicit examples, comments/questions welcome!