Saturday, 17 May 2008

ag.algebraic geometry - Degree of canonical bundle?

Take any curve at all, of any genus g, and any divisor of degree d > 2g. This embeds the curve into projective space with degree d, and a generic projection embeds it in P^3 also with any degree d > 2g. So d and n determine almost nothing about the curve.


On the positive side, interestingly, the nice counterexample given for the original question, a rational cubic in P^3, although not determined by its degree, is completely determined by its degree and the fact that (unlike the plane cubic) it spans P^3. (Rational normal curves are about the only examples I can think of, spanning but not a complete intersection, where d,n do determine all the invariants.)



I guess you could give an inequality at least for the genus (i.e. h^1(O)) of curves in P^3, since a curve of degree d in P^3 projects to a plane curve of degree d-1, hence has genus bounded above by that of a general such plane curve. Indeed Castelnuovo has a famous such inequality.

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