Geometry of Horospherical Varieties of Picard Rank One

We study the geometry of smooth non-homogeneous horospherical varieties of Picard rank one. These have been classified by Pasquier and include the well-known odd symplectic Grassmannians. We focus our study on quantum cohomology, with a view towards Dubrovin's conjecture. We start with describing the cohomology groups of smooth horospherical varieties of Picard rank one. We show a Chevalley formula for these and establish that many Gromov-Witten invariants are enumerative. This enables us to prove that in many cases the quantum cohomology is semisimple. We give a presentation of the quantum cohomology ring for odd symplectic Grassmannians. In the last sections, we turn to derived categories of coherent sheaves. We first discuss a general construction of exceptional bundles on horospherical varieties. We work out in detail the case of the horospherical variety associated to the exceptional group G2 and construct a full rectangular Lefschetz exceptional collection in the derived category.