Low-degree rational curves on hypersurfaces in projective spaces and their fan degenerations (Q2196350)

In the last decades, the importance of the study of rational curves to understand higher dimensional algebraic varieties has emerged. Let \(X\) be an algebraic variety. If the canonical bundle of \(X\) is positive, then there are not many rational curves contained in \(X\). On the other hand, when it is not pseudoeffective, there is plenty of rational curves in \(X\). Morally, one may think that a rational curve measures somehow the negativity of \(\Omega_X\) along itself. Of course, this is just the philosophy and one has to be careful in formalizing this idea. One of the ingredients to formalize this is to study the properties of the normal bundle of the rational curves in \(X\), and this is part of the content of this paper. In this paper, the author focus on Fano manifolds, which are the varieties where rational curves move most freely. More precisely, he proves that on a general hypersurface of \(\mathbb{P}^n\) of degree at most \(n\), there exists a rational curve with a balanced normal bundle of any degree, provided that it is smaller than \(2n-2\) and \(n\) is at least \(4\). The techniques used by the author are based on a degeneration argument for the ambient space into a reducible, but a simpler object. The author also proves some interesting results on the irreducibility of the family of certain rational curves.