Frobenius amplitude and strong vanishing theorems for vector bundles

The primary goal of this paper is to systematically exploit the method of Deligne-Illusie to obtain Kodaira type vanishing theorems for vector bundles and more generally coherent sheaves on algebraic varieties. The key idea is to introduce a number which provides a cohomological measure of the positivity of a coherent sheaf called the Frobenius or F-amplitude. As the terminology indicates, the definition is most natural over a field of positive characteristic, however it can be forced into characteristic 0 by standard tricks. The F-amplitude enters into the statement of the basic vanishing theorem, and this leads to the problem of calculating, or at least estimating, this number. Most of the work in this paper is devoted to doing this various situations. The key result in this direction is a bound on the F-amplitude of an ample vector bundle. When combined with the vanishing theorem, this has some reasonably down to earth corollaries (both old and new).