Isotropic and coisotropic subvarieties of Grassmannians (Q2217544)

The authors extend to subvarieties of any codimension in Grassmannians the notion of coisotropic hypersurfaces introduced by Gel'fand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky. A subvariety \(W\) is strongly coisotropic if every homomorphism in the conormal spaces of \(W\) has rank at most one. It turns out that the characterization of coisotropic hypersurfaces in terms of Chow hypersurfaces associated to projective varieties extends to strongly coisotropic subvarieties. Indeed the authors show that \(W\subset \mathrm{Gr}(a,\mathbb P^n)\) is strongly coisotropic if and only if there is an irreducible variety \(X\subset\mathbb P^n\) such that \(W\) is the Zariski closure of the set of all \(a\)-dimensional projective subspaces which intersect \(X\) at some smooth point non-transversely. A weaker notion of coisotropic subvarieties in Grassmannians is provided: \(W\) is coisotropic if each conormal space lies in the Zariski closure of the set of linear spaces that are spanned by homomorphisms of rank one. The authors study several properties of coisotropic subvarieties. They also prove that for a general hypersurface \(X\) of degree at least three in \(\mathbb P^n\) and for \(2\leq m\leq n,\deg(X)\), the closure of the variety of lines which intersect \(X\) at some smooth point with multiplicity \(m\) is coisotropic. Finally, the authors introduce the notion of isotropic subvarieties, for which the previous rank-one conditions hold on the tangent vectors, instead of on conormal vectors. The authors prove a full characterization of isotropic curves in Grassmannians in terms of preimages of obsculating subspaces to curves under suitable projections.