Geometric collections and Castelnuovo-Mumford Regularity

The paper begins by overviewing the basic facts on geometric exceptional collections. Then, we derive, for any coherent sheaf $\cF$ on a smooth projective variety with a geometric collection, two spectral sequences: the first one abuts to $\cF$ and the second one to its cohomology. The main goal of the paper is to generalize Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity for coherent sheaves on projective spaces to coherent sheaves on smooth projective varieties $X$ with a geometric collection $\sigma$. We define the notion of regularity of a coherent sheaf $\cF$ on $X$ with respect to $\sigma$. We show that the basic formal properties of the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of coherent sheaves over projective spaces continue to hold in this new setting and we show that in case of coherent sheaves on $\PP^n$ and for a suitable geometric collection of coherent sheaves on $\PP^n$ both notions of regularity coincide. Finally, we carefully study the regularity of coherent sheaves on a smooth quadric hypersurface $Q_n \subset \PP^{n+1}$ ($n$ odd) with respect to a suitable geometric collection and we compare it with the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of their extension by zero in $\PP^{n+1}$.