ZeroLocus62, a label format for zero loci

Pieter Belmans

2026/08/16

ZeroLocus62 is a compact, canonical encoding for bundles, zero loci, and degeneracy loci of completely reducible vector bundles on partial flag varieties. The label 40.G is a quintic threefold, and 603.111 is the Fano 3-fold 1-10, the zero locus of $(\bigwedge^2 \mathcal{U}^\vee)^{\oplus 3}$ on $\mathrm{Gr}(3,7)$.

The format

A label has the shape <ambient>.<bundle>. The part before the dot encodes a product of partial flag varieties, one Dynkin type, rank, and set of marked nodes per factor; the part after the dot encodes the highest weights of the summands of the bundle. A third form with two - separators encodes degeneracy loci. Everything is written in the Base62 alphabet, the 62 characters 09, AZ, az, which is where the name comes from: labels stay short, and they are safe in URLs and filenames without any escaping.

The format is canonical: summands and ambient factors are put in a prescribed order before encoding, so two systems describing the same zero locus produce the same string. That is exactly what you want when storing them in a database or communicating them across systems.

Now in the General registry

The repository ships the specification (currently v3.1.2, for the v3.1 format) together with reference implementations in Python, Julia, JavaScript, and Macaulay2. The Julia one is now in the General registry, so installing it is simply

using Pkg
Pkg.add("ZeroLocus62")

instead of the Pkg.add(url=..., subdir="julia") incantation from the previous posts.

For the full specification, worked examples, and a live decoder, see the website.