arXiv subjects

Lawrence Ein

Publications and source records attributed to Lawrence Ein.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Some local and global properties of secant varieties of nonsingular projective curves

The main goal of this paper is to study some local and global properties of secant varieties of algebraic curves. These results complement our previous work [8] by addressing issues given therein and providing solutions to problems raised subsequently. Specifically, we show a description of tangent cones of secant varieties of curves, and compute the cohomology groups of secant sheaves on symmetric products of curves, which answers a question posed in [8] and leads to a recursive formula for Hilbert polynomials of secant varieties of curves. In the appendix, we present a cohomological approach to arithmetical Cohen--Macaulayness of secant varieties of curves, completing the proof in [8].

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arXiv2023

Erratum to the paper: Asymptotic Invariants of Base Loci

This note points out a gap in the proof of one of the technical results in the paper "Asymptotic Invariants of Base Loci", that appeared in Ann. Inst. Fourier (Grenoble) 56 (2006), 1701-1734. We provide a correct proof of this result.

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arXiv2023

On vanishing of fundamental forms of algebraic varieties

We study fundamental forms of algebraic varieties using the sheaves of principal parts of line bundles and establish a vanishing theorem for any order fundamental forms. We also give connection of fundamental forms with the higher order Gauss map and higher order tangent varieties.

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arXiv2021

Saturation bounds for smooth varieties

We prove bounds on the saturation degrees of homogeneous ideals (and their powers) defining smooth complex projective varieties. For example, we show that a classical statement due to Macualay for zero-dimensional complete intersection ideals holds for any smooth variety. For curves, we bound the saturation degree of powers in terms of the regularity.

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arXiv2020

Singularities and syzygies of secant varieties of nonsingular projective curves

In recent years, the equations defining secant varieties and their syzygies have attracted considerable attention. The purpose of the present paper is to conduct a thorough study on secant varieties of curves by settling several conjectures and revealing interaction between singularities and syzygies. The main results assert that if the degree of the embedding line bundle of a nonsingular curve of genus $g$ is greater than $2g+2k+p$ for nonnegative integers $k$ and $p$, then the $k$-th secant variety of the curve has normal Du Bois singularities, is arithmetically Cohen--Macaulay, and satisfies the property $N_{k+2, p}$. In addition, the singularities of the secant varieties are further classified according to the genus of the curve, and the Castelnuovo--Mumford regularities are also obtained as well. As one of the main technical ingredients, we establish a vanishing theorem on the Cartesian products of the curve, which may have independent interests and may find applications elsewhere.

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arXiv2019

Cayley-Bacharach theorems with excess vanishing

Griffiths and Harris showed in 1978 that if E is a rank n vector bundle on a smooth projective variety of dimension n, and if s is a section of E vanishing simply on a finite set Z, then any section of (K_X + det E) vanishing at all but one of the points of Z must also vanish on the remaining one. This generalizes the classical theorem of Cayley-Bacharach, which appears when E is a direct sum of line bundles on projective space. In a recent paper, Mu-Lin Li proposed an extension allowing for the possibility that the zero-locus of s has positive dimensional components, but his result requires a splitting hypothesis that in practice is rarely satisfied. We show that multiplier ideals lead to a quite clean statement in the case of excess vanishing. Along the way, we give simplified and somewhat strengthened accounts of results of Tan-Viehweg and Sun.

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arXiv2019

Tangent developable surfaces and the equations defining algebraic curves

This is an introduction, aimed at a general mathematical audience, to recent work of Aprodu, Farkas, Papadima, Raicu and Weyman. These authors established a long-standing folk conjecture concerning the equations defining the tangent developable surface of a rational normal curve. This in turn led to a new proof of a fundamental theorem of Voisin on the syzygies of a general canonical curve. The present note, which is the write-up of a talk given by the second author at the Current Events seminar at the 2019 JMM, surveys this circle of ideas.

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arXiv2018

The Konno invariant of some algebraic varieties

The Konno invariant of a projective variety X is the minimum geometric genus of the fiber of a rational pencil on X. It was computed by Konno for surfaces in P^3, and in general can be viewed as a measure of the complexity of X. We estimate Konno(X) for some natural classes of varieties, including sharp asymptotics for polarized K3 surfaces. In an appendix, we give a quick proof of a classical formula due to Deligne and Hoskin for the colength of an integrally closed ideal on a surface.

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arXiv2018

Jet closures and the local isomorphism problem

If a morphism of germs of schemes induces isomorphisms of all local jet schemes, does it follow that the morphism is an isomorphism? This problem is called the local isomorphism problem. In this paper, we use jet schemes to introduce various closure operations among ideals and relate them to the local isomorphism problem. This approach leads to a partial solution of the local isomorphism problem, which is shown to have a negative answer in general and a positive one in several situations of geometric interest.

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arXiv2016

Measures of irrationality for hypersurfaces of large degree

We study various measures of irrationality for hypersurfaces of large degree in projective space and other varieties. These include the least degree of a rational covering of projective space, and the minimal gonality of a covering family of curves. The theme is that positivity properties of canonical bundles lead to lower bounds on these invariants. In particular, we prove that if X is a very general smooth hypersurface of dimension n and degree d \ge 2n+1, then any dominant rational mapping from X to projective n-space must have degree at least d-1. We also propose a number of open problems, and we show how our methods lead to simple new proofs of results of Ran and Beheshti-Eisenbud.

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arXiv2016

A vanishing theorem for weight one syzygies

Inspired by the methods of Voisin, the first two authors recently proved that one could read off the gonality of a curve C from the syzygies of its ideal in any one embedding of sufficiently large degree. This was deduced from from a vanishing theorem for the asymptotic syzygies associated to an arbitrary line bundle B on C. The present paper extends this vanishing theorem to a smooth projective variety X of arbitrary dimension. Specifically, given a line bundle B on X, we prove that if B is p-jet very ample (i.e. the sections of B separate jets of total weight p+1) then the weight one Koszul cohomology group K_{p,1}(X, B; L) vanishes for all sufficiently positive L. In the other direction, we show that if there is a reduced cycle of length p+1 that fails to impose independent conditions on sections of B, then the Koszul group in question is non-zero for very positive L.

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arXiv2016

A quick proof of nonvanishing for asymptotic syzygies

We give a quick new approach to the main cases of the nonvanishing theorems of first and third authors concerning the asymptotic behavior of the syzygies of a projective variety as the positivity of the embedding line bundle grows. Specifically, we present a surprisingly elementary and concrete proof of the asymptotic nonvanishing of Veronese syzygies, and we obtain effective results for arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay varieties. The idea is that one can reduce the statements to some simple computations with monomials.

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arXiv2016

Syzygies of projective varieties of large degree: recent progress and open problems

This paper is a survey of recent work on the asymptotic behavior of the syzygies of a smooth complex projective variety as the positivity of the embedding line bundle grows. After a quick overview of results from the 1980s and 1990s concerning the linearity of the first few terms of a resolution, we discuss a non-vanishing theorem to the effect that from an asymptotic viewpoint, essentially all of the syzygy modules that could be non-zero are in fact non-zero. We explain the quick new proof of this result in the case of Veronese varieties due to Erman and authors, and we explore some results and conjectures about the asymptotics of Betti numbers. Finally we discuss the case of syzygies of weight one, and the gonality conjecture on the syzygies of curves of large degree. The exposition also discusses numerous open questions and conjectures.

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arXiv2015

A vanishing theorem for log canonical pairs

Using inversion of adjunction, we deduce from Nadel's theorem a vanishing property for ideals sheaves on projective varieties, a special case of which recovers a result due to Bertram--Ein--Lazarsfeld. This enables us to generalize to a large class of projective schemes certain bounds on Castelnuovo--Mumford regularity previously obtained by Bertram--Ein--Lazarsfeld in the smooth case and by Chardin--Ulrich for locally complete intersection varieties with rational singularities. Our results are tested on several examples.

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arXiv2015

Divisorial valuations via arcs

This paper shows a finiteness property of a divisorial valuation in terms of arcs. First we show that every divisorial valuation over an algebraic variety corresponds to an irreducible closed subset of the arc space. Then we define the codimension for this subset and give a formula of the codimension in terms of "relative Mather canonical class". By using this subset, we prove that a divisorial valuation is determined by assigning the values of finite functions. We also have a criterion for a divisorial valuation to be a monomial valuation by assigning the values of finite functions.

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arXiv2014

The gonality conjecture on syzygies of algebraic curves of large degree

We show that a small variant of the methods used by Voisin in her study of canonical curves leads to a surprisingly quick proof of the gonality conjecture of Green and the second author, asserting that one can read off the gonality of a curve C from its resolution in the embedding defined by any one line bundle of sufficiently large degree. More generally, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the asymptotic vanishing of the weight one syzygies of the module associated to an arbitrary line bundle on C.

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arXiv2013

Singularities with respect to Mather-Jacobian discrepancies

As is well known, the "usual discrepancy" is defined for a normal Q-Gorenstein variety. By using this discrepancy we can define a canonical singularity and a log canonical singularity. In the same way, by using a new notion, Mather-Jacobian discrepancy introduced in recent papers we can define a "canonical singularity" and a "log canonical singularity" for not necessarily normal or Q-Gorenstein varieties. In this paper, we show basic properties of these singularities, behavior of these singularities under deformations and determine all these singularities of dimension up to 2.

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arXiv2012

Stability of syzygy bundles on an algebraic surface

Given a very ample line bundle L on a projective variety X, the syzygy bundle M_L associated to L is the kernel of the evaluation map on sections of L. Our main result is that if X is a smooth projective surface defined over an algebraically closed field, then M_L is slope-stable for any sufficiently positive L.

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