Works by O’Grady allow to associate with a two-dimensional Gushel–Mukai (GM) variety, which is a K3 surface, a double Eisenbud–Popescu–Walter (EPW) sextic. We characterize the $K3$ surfaces whose associated double EPW sextic is smooth. As a consequence, we are able to produce symplectic actions on some families of smooth double EPW sextics which are hyper-Kähler manifolds.

We also provide bounds for the automorphism group of GM varieties in dimension 2 and higher.

We construct the first example of a stable hyperholomorphic vector bundle of rank five on every hyper-Kähler manifold of $\mathrm {K3}^{[2]}$-type whose deformation space is smooth of dimension 10. Its moduli space is birational to a hyper-Kähler manifold of type OG10. This provides evidence for the expectation that moduli spaces of sheaves on a hyper-Kähler could lead to new examples of hyper-Kähler manifolds.

We introduce a linearised form of the square root of the Todd class inside the Verbitsky component of a hyper-Kähler manifold using the extended Mukai lattice. This enables us to define a Mukai vector for certain objects in the derived category taking values inside the extended Mukai lattice which is functorial for derived equivalences. As applications, we obtain a structure theorem for derived equivalences between hyper-Kähler manifolds as well as an integral lattice associated to the derived category of hyper-Kähler manifolds deformation equivalent to the Hilbert scheme of a K3 surface mimicking the surface case.

Recently, L. Rozansky and E. Witten associated to any hyper-Kähler manifold X a system of ’weights‘ (numbers, one for each trivalent graph) and used them to construct invariants of topological 3-manifolds. We give a simple cohomological definition of these weights in terms of the Atiyah class of X (the obstruction to the existence of a holomorphic connection). We show that the analogy between the tensor of curvature of a hyper-Kähler metric and the tensor of structure constants of a Lie algebra observed by Rozansky and Witten, holds in fact for any complex manifold, if we work at the level of cohomology and for any Kähler manifold, if we work at the level of Dolbeault cochains. As an outcome of our considerations, we give a formula for Rozansky–Witten classes using any Kähler metric on a holomorphic symplectic manifold.