Positivity of the second exterior power of the tangent bundles (Q2032928)

Smooth projective varieties whose tangent bundle has positive properties are expected to be described. The ampleness of the tangent bundle, for instance, characterizes the projective space and its nefness implies that, up to a finite étale cover, the Albanese morphism is a locally trivial fibrations with a smooth Fano variety with nef tangent bundle as fiber. Moreover, under the assumption of nefness, contractions of extremal rays (negative with respect to the canonical bundle) are smooth morphisms, and Fano varieties are conjectured to be homogeneous (see the Introduction of the paper under review and references therein). In this work, the author studies the case in which the second exterior power of the tangent bundle is nef, where some results for 3-folds (see Thm. 1.4) and, under additional hyptheses, for higher dimensions were known. The structure of smooth projective varieties \(X\) of dimension \(\geq 3\) such that the second exterior power of its tangent bundle \(\wedge^2 T_X\) is nef is described in Thm. 1.5: up to a finite étale cover, the Albanese morphism is a locally trivial fibration, whose fiber \(F\) is Fano and, either its tangent bundle \(T_F\) is nef (when the dimension of the Albanese variety is bigger than 0), or \(X\) is ismorphic to \(F\). In particular, as a corollary (see cor. 1.6), the nefness of \(\wedge^2 T_X\) (\(\dim X \geq 3\)), implies that either \(T_X\) is nef or that \(X\) is Fano. Furthermore (see Thm. 1.7), the extremal contractions are also studied: either \(X\) is the blow-up of the projective space at a point, or any contraction of a \(K_X\)-negative extremal ray is a smooth morphism. These results are applied to show (see Thm. 1.8) that, when \(X\) is rationally connected, the nefness of \(\wedge^2 T_X\) implies that \(X\) is Fano and its Kleiman-Mori cone is simplicial. Finally, when \(X\) is toroidal spherical (see Thm. 1.9), \(X\) is either rational homogeneous or the blow-up of \({\mathbb P}^n\) at a point. The known results on \(3\)-folds are extended up to dimension \(6\) in Thm. 1.10.