Gröbner bases and the Cohen-Macaulay property of Li's double determinantal varieties

Abstract: We consider double determinantal varieties, a special case of Nakajima quiver varieties. Li conjectured that double determinantal varieties are normal, irreducible, Cohen-Macaulay varieties whose defining ideals have a Gr\"obner basis given by their natural generators. We use liaison theory to prove this conjecture in a manner that generalizes results for mixed ladder determinantal varieties. We also give a formula for the dimension of a double determinantal variety.