Moduli of vector bundles on projective surfaces: some basic results

We prove that moduli spaces of torsion-free sheaves on a projective smooth complex surface are irreducible, reduced and of the expected dimension, provided the expected dimension is large enough. Actually we prove more: given a line bundle on the surface, we show that the number of moduli of sheaves which have a non-zero twisted (by the chosen line-bundle) endomorphism grows slower than the expected dimension of the moduli space (for fixed rank and increasing discriminant). The bounds we get are effective: we concentrate on the case of rank two and we give a lower bound on the discriminant guaranteeing that the moduli space is reduced of the expected dimension. We also give an effective irreducibility result for complete intersections. All of the above follows from a theorem bounding the dimension of complete subsets of the moduli space which do not intersect the boundary.