Semistable sheaves in positive characteristic

Abstract

We prove Maruyama's conjecture on the boundedness of slope semistable sheaves on a projective variety defined over a noetherian ring. Our approach also gives a new proof of the boundedness for varieties defined over a characteristic zero field. This result implies that in mixed characteristic the moduli spaces of Gieseker semistable sheaves are projective schemes of finite type. The proof uses a new inequality bounding slopes of the restriction of a sheaf to a hypersurface in terms of its slope and the discriminant. This inequality also leads to effective restriction theorems in all characteristics, improving earlier results in characteristic zero.