We undertake a detailed study of the geometry of Bottacin’s Poisson structures on
Hilbert schemes of points in Poisson surfaces, ie smooth complex surfaces equipped
with an effective anticanonical divisor. We focus on three themes that, while logically
independent, are linked by the interplay between (characteristic) symplectic leaves
and deformation theory. Firstly, we construct the symplectic groupoids of the Hilbert
schemes and develop the classification of their symplectic leaves, using the methods
of derived symplectic geometry. Secondly, we establish local normal forms for the
Poisson brackets, and combine them with a toric degeneration argument to verify
that Hilbert schemes satisfy our recent conjecture characterizing holonomic
Poisson manifolds in terms of the geometry of the modular vector field.
Finally, using constructible sheaf methods, we compute the space of first-order
Poisson deformations when the anticanonical divisor is reduced and has only
quasihomogeneous singularities. (The latter is automatic if the surface is
projective.) Along the way, we find a tight connection between the Poisson
geometry of the Hilbert schemes and the finite-dimensional Lie algebras of
affine transformations, which is mediated by syzygies. In particular, we find
that the Hilbert scheme has a natural subvariety that serves as a global
counterpart of the nilpotent cone, and we prove that the Lie algebras of affine
transformations have holonomic dual spaces — the first such series of Lie algebras to
be discovered.