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Brill--Noether loci on moduli spaces of symplectic bundles over curves

The symplectic Brill--Noether locus ${\mathcal S}_{2n, K}^k$ associated to a curve $C$ parametrises stable rank $2n$ bundles over $C$ with at least $k$ sections and which carry a nondegenerate skewsymmetric bilinear form with values in the canonical bundle. This is a symmetric determinantal variety whose tangent spaces are defined by a symmetrised Petri map. We obtain upper bounds on the dimensions of various components of ${\mathcal S}_{2n, K}^k$. We show the nonemptiness of several ${\mathcal S}_{2n, K}^k$, and in most of these cases also the existence of a component which is generically smooth and of the expected dimension. As an application, for certain values of $n$ and $k$ we exhibit components of excess dimension of the standard Brill--Noether locus $B^k_{2n, 2n(g-1)}$ over any curve of genus $g \ge 122$. We obtain similar results for moduli spaces of coherent systems.