Bilinear secants and birational geometry of blowups of $\mathbb P^n \times \mathbb P^{n+1}$

Abstract

We introduce bilinear secant varieties and joins of subvarieties of products of projective spaces, as a generalisation of the classical secant varieties and joins of projective varieties. We show that the bilinear secant varieties of certain rational normal curves of $\mathbb P^n \times \mathbb P^{n+1}$ play a central role in the study of the birational geometry of $X^{n,n+1}_s$, its blowup in $s$ points in general position. We show that $X^{n,n+1}_s$ is log Fano, and we compute its effective and movable cones, for $s\le n+2$ and $n\ge 1$ and for $s\le n+3$ and $n\le 2$, and we compute the effective and movable cones of $X^{3,4}_6$.