Green's currents for families of Hermitian vector bundles characterizing certain vanishing loci (Q1032508)

The authors generalize their integral characterization of the Andreotti-Mayer locus given in an earlier paper to a more general situation. Given a family \(\rho:X\to Y\) of smooth, projective, n-dimensional, complex varieties and a hermitian vector bundle \(\overline{V}\) of rank \(n - p+1\) on \(X\) together with a holomorphic section \(\sigma \) of the restriction of \(V\) to a \(p\)-codimensional cycle \(D\subseteq X\), they are able to determine an explicit Green's current \(g\) for the vanishing locus \(Z\) of \(\sigma \) for certain values of \(p\). The integral representation for the push-forward \(\rho_{*} g\) then gives a characterization of \(\rho_{*} Z\). By specializing the given data suitably, they recover an integral representation of the discriminant characterizing the locus of singular hypersurfaces of degree \(d\) in \(n\)-dimensional, projective space.