Plane curves containing a star configuration (Q2341550)

The authors study \textit{star configurations} \(Z\subset\mathbb P^2\), defined as sets of points which are the pairwise intersections of collections of lines \(L_1,\dots,L_\ell\), no three lines meeting at a point. The final target is the computation of the dimension of spaces \(D_{d,\ell}\) which parametrize curves of degree \(d\) containing a star configuration of \(\ell\) lines. The spaces \(D_{d,\ell}\) turn out to be empty when \(d<\ell-1\). In a previous series of papers, the authors proved that for \(\ell=2,3,4\) and \(d=\ell-1\), as well as for \(\ell=5,\;d\geq 5\), a \textit{general} curve of degree \(d\) contains a star configuration of \(\ell\) lines. The case \((d,\ell)=(4,5)\) is the classical case of Lüroth quartics. The computation for \((d,\ell)\neq (4,5)\) is performed, for any \(\ell\), first by proving that it is sufficient to consider what happens in a fixed degree \(d(\ell)\), and then reducing the problem to compute the rank of a matrix obtained by special collections of lines.