Fano varieties and linear sections of hypersurfaces

We investigate the global variation of moduli of linear sections of a general hypersurface. We prove a "generic Torelli" result for a large proportion of cases, and we obtain a complete picture of the global variation of moduli of line slices of a general hypersurface.

We show that complex Fano hypersurfaces can have arbitrarily large degrees of irrationality. More precisely, if we fix a Fano index e, then the degree of irrationality of a very general complex Fano hypersurface of index e and dimension n is bounded from below by a constant times $\sqrt{n}$. To our knowledge this gives the first examples of rationally connected varieties with degrees of irrationality greater than 3. The proof follows a degeneration to characteristic p argumen...

A result of Beauville states that with a few positive characterstic exceptions, the smooth hyperplane sections of hypersurfaces of degree $d>2$ in projective space are not all isomorphic. We address the question of whether these sections vary as much as possible. In arbitrary characteristic, we show that this is the case for a general hypersurface.

We study the family of rational curves on arbitrary smooth hypersurfaces of low degree using tools from analytic number theory.

We show the Kontsevich space of rational curves of degree at most roughly $\frac{2-\sqrt{2}}{2}n$ on a general hypersurface $X\subset \mathbb{P}^n$ of degree $n-1$ is equidimensional of expected dimension and has two components: one consisting generically of smooth, embedded rational curves and the other consisting of multiple covers of a line. This proves more cases of a conjecture of Coskun, Harris, and Starr and shows the Gromov-Witten invariants in these cases are enumera...

For a Zariski general (regular) hypersurface $V$ of degree $M$ in the $(M+1)$-dimensional projective space, where $M$ is at least 16, with at most quadratic singularities of rank at least 13, we give a complete description of the structures of rationally connected (or Fano-Mori) fibre space: every such structure over a positive-dimensional base is a pencil of hyperplane sections. This implies, in particular, that $V$ is non-rational and its groups of birational and biregular ...

Let X be a subvariety of $P^n$ defined by equations of degrees $ d =(d_1,...,d_s)$, over an algebraically closed field k of any characteristic. We study properties of the Fano scheme $F_r(X)$ that parametrizes linear subspaces of dimension r contained in X. We prove that $F_r(X)$ is connected and smooth of the expected dimension for n big enough (this was previously known in characteristic 0 or for r=1). Using Bott's theorem, we prove a vanishing theorem for certain bundles o...

Let n > 2 and let d < (n+1)/2. We prove that for a general hypersurface X of degree d in P^n, all the genus 0 Kontsevich moduli spaces M_{0,n}(X,e) are irreducible, reduced, local complete intersection stacks of the expected dimension.

We study subvarieties of a general projective degree $d$ hypersurface $X_d\subset \mathbf P^n$. Our main theorem, which improves previous results of L. Ein and C. Voisin, implies in particular the following sharp corollary: any subvariety of a general hypersurface $X_{d}\subset {\mathbf P}^n$, for $n\geq 6$ and $d\geq 2n-2$, is of general type.

This is a survey on the Fano schemes of linear spaces, conics, rational curves, and curves of higher genera in smooth projective hypersurfaces, complete intersections, Fano threefolds, etc.