Secant varieties and birational geometry (Q1433402)

In this paper the author continues the geometric construction of a sequence of flips associated to an embedded projective variety \(X\) begun in a previous paper [Compos. Math. 125, No. 3, 263--282 (2001; Zbl 1056.14016)]. The existence of these flips is strictly related to the degrees of the forms defining the secant varieties of \(X\): the author studies in detail this problem and, in particular, he proves that large embeddings of varieties have secant varieties that are at least set-theoretically defined by cubics.