We study endomorphism algebras of 2-term silting complexes in derived categories of hereditary finite dimensional algebras, or more generally of Ext-finite hereditary abelian categories. Module categories of such endomorphism algebras are known to occur as hearts of certain bounded t-structures in such derived categories. We show that the algebras occurring are exactly the algebras of small homological dimension, which are algebras characterized by the property that each indecomposable module either has injective dimension at most one, or it has projective dimension at most one.

Given an Artinian algebra $A$ over a field $k$, there are several combinatorial objects associated to $A$. They are the diagram $D_A$ as defined by Drozd and Kirichenko, the natural quiver $\Delta_A$ defined by Li (cf. Section 2), and a generalized version of $k$-species $(A/r, r/r^2)$ with $r$ being the Jacobson radical of $A$. When $A$ is splitting over the field $k$, the diagram $D_A$ and the well-known ext-quiver $\Gamma_A$ are the same. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the relations among these combinatorial objects and in turn to use these relations to give a characterization of the algebra $A$.

For smooth compact oriented Riemannian manifolds$M$of dimension 4$k$+2,$k$≥0, with or without boundary, and a vector bundle$F$on$M$with an inner product and a flat connection, we construct a modification of the Hodge star operator on the middle-dimensional (parabolic) cohomology of$M$twisted by$F$. This operator induces a canonical complex structure on the middle-dimensional cohomology space that is compatible with the natural symplectic form given by integrating the wedge product. In particular, when$k$=0 we get a canonical almost complex structure on the non-singular part of the moduli space of flat connections on a Riemann surface, with monodromies along boundary components belonging to fixed conjugacy classes when the surface has boundary, that is compatible with the standard symplectic form on the moduli space.