Legendrian subvarieties of projective space (Q2498412)

Legendrian subvarieties arise in the study of holomorphic contact manifolds. Given a complex projective variety \(Y\), the projectivisation of its tangent bundle yields a contact manifold. Conjecturally, every projective complex contact manifold arises either from this construction or from a minimal nilpotent orbit of the adjoint action of a complex simple Lie group on its Lie algebra. It is known that a projective complex contact manifold not belonging to the first class is necessarily a Fano variety with \(b_2=1\). Now a Fano contact manifold with \(b_2=1\) induces a Legendrian subvariety of a projective space. Understanding these Legendrian subvarieties could lead to a proof of the aformentioned conjecture on the classification of projective complex contact manifolds. The article provides a step in this direction by classifiying those smooth Legendrian varieties whose ideal is generated by quadratic polynomials. It is shown that such varieties are homogeneous. Another result describes Legendrian varieties which are complete intersections.