Appears in collection : Mathematics on the Crossroad of Centuries - A Conference in Honor of Maxim Kontsevich's 60th Birthday

A periodic pencil of flat connections on a smooth algebraic variety $X$ is a linear family of flat connections $\nabla(s_1,...,s_n)=d-\sum_{i=1}^r\sum_{j=1}^ns_jB_{ij}dx_i$, where $\lbrace x_i\rbrace$ are local coordinates on $X$ and $B_{ij}: X\to {\rm Mat}_N$ are matrix-valued regular functions. A pencil is periodic if it is generically invariant under the shifts $s_j\mapsto s_j+1$ up to isomorphism. I will explain that periodic pencils have many remarkable properties, and there are many interesting examples of them, e.g. Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov, Dunkl, Casimir connections and equivariant quantum connections for conical symplectic resolutions with finitely many torus fixed points. I will also explain that in characteristic $p$, the $p$-curvature operators $\lbrace C_i,1\le i\le r\rbrace$ of a periodic pencil $\nabla$ are isospectral to the commuting endomorphisms $C_i^*:=\sum_{j=1}^n (s_j-s_j^p)B_{ij}^{(1)}$, where $B_{ij}^{(1)}$ is the Frobenius twist of $B_{ij}$. This allows us to compute the eigenvalues of the $p$-curvature for the above examples, and also to show that a periodic pencil of connections always has regular singularites. This is joint work with Alexander Varchenko.