Ramification divisors of general projections (Q2209882)

Let \(X\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) be a smooth projective variety of dimension \(r\), not contained in a hyperplane, and let \(L\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) be a general linear subspace of codimension \(r+1\). The projection from \(L\) defines a finite surjective map \(\pi:X\rightarrow\mathbb{P}^{r}\) with ramification divisor \(R(L)\in|K_{X}-\pi^{*}K_{\mathbb{P}^{r}}|\). The paper deals with the rational map \(\rho\) sending linear subspaces \(L\) to \(R(L)\), called the projection-ramification map. In the first result, the authors give two sufficient conditions for \(\rho\) to be generically finite onto its image. The first condition is incompressibility: that is for every \(L\) the projection restricts to a dominant rational map \(X\dashrightarrow\mathbb{P}^{r}\). This condition implies that \(\rho\) is a morphism, and it must be finite. The second condition is that the dual variety of \(X\) is a hypersurface. The proof of this condition is more difficult and uses properties of non-defective linear series. Other results are dedicated to the case when \(X\) is a scroll. The reason is that for varieties \(X\) of minimal degree the dimension of the linear system \(|K_{X}-\pi^{*}K_{\mathbb{P}^{r}}|\) is equal to the dimension of the Grassmannian \(\mathrm{Gr}(n-r,n+1)\). The authors proves that there exists a rational normal scroll \(X\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) of every dimension \(r\ge4\) and degree \(d\ge r+1\) for which the projection-ramification map \(\rho\) is not generically finite onto its image. In the last section, the projection-ramification map of some particular scroll is described in detail. But the main theorem is that for generic scrolls of high degree, the projection-ramification map is finite onto its image. This is proved in the following way. First of all, using linked limit linear series they defines a variant of the projection-ramification map. After that, they degenerate a vector bundle \(E\) to a vector bundle on a nodal curve, and show that \(\rho\) is dominant for the degenerated vector bundle.