A remark on boundedness of manifolds embedded with small codimension (Q2000598)

Projective manifolds \(X \subset \mathbb{P}^N\) of dimension \(n\) and codimension \(c \leq n\) are said to be of small codimension. They have many special properties. In particular, for \(c=2\), manifolds of this kind and not of general type have bounded degree. The author and \textit{M. Toma} [Contemp. Math. 162, 215--225 (1994; Zbl 0848.14001)] obtained an explicit bound for the degree in some special cases: In the paper under review, their result is rephrased as follows: let \(X \subset \mathbb{P}^N\) be as above with \(c \leq n\), let \(K_X\) and \(H\) be the canonical bundle and the hyperplane bundle, respectively; if there exists a constant \(a \geq 0\) such that \(K_X \cdot H^{n-1} \leq a \deg(X)\), then \(\deg(X) < (a+2n+1)^n\). In the paper under review, which can be seen as an appendix to the paper quoted above, according to the author, the boundedness of the degree for manifolds of small codimension is related with the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the structure sheaf. For a manifold \(X \subset \mathbb{P}^N\) as above and of small codimension the author proves that if \(\mathcal{O}_X\) is \(m\)-regular, i.e., \(h^i(\mathcal O_X(m-i))=0\) for all \(i > 0\), then \(\deg(X) < \max \{(2n+1)^n, (2m+n)^n \}\). As a corollary, it turns out that manifolds of small codimension whose structure sheaf is arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay (in a weak sense) have degree bounded by \((3n+2)^n\), provided that their canonical map is not birational.