Tangent bundle of punctual Hilbert scheme and distinguishing products of varieties

Abstract

We describe the indecomposable components of the tangent bundle of the punctual Hilbert scheme of a smooth projective surface. As an application, we prove a recent conjecture about classification of products of punctual Hilbert schemes of smooth projective surfaces. We also determine when two products of symmetric powers of a smooth variety can be isomorphic. As a key step in our proof, we give a new characterization of abelian varieties, which states that in dimension $\geq 2$, a smooth complex projective variety whose tangent bundle is trivial upto a line bundle twist is an abelian variety.