Degenerations of scrolls to unions of planes (Q2460785)

In the paper under review the authors continue their study of degenerations of projective surfaces to unions of planes, initiated in the article \textit{A. Calabri et al.} [On the geometric genus of reducible surfaces and degenerations of surfaces to unions of planes, The Fano Conference 2002, Torino: Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Matematica, 277--312 (2004; Zbl 1071.14057)] and continued in \textit{A. Calabri} et al. [Ann. Math. (2) 165, No. 2, 335--395 (2007; Zbl 1122.14028)]. Here they are interested in the case of scrolls of any genus \(g\geq 0\) and they look for degenerations to Zappatic surfaces with the simplest possible Zappatic singularities. The term ``Zappatic'' (introduced by the authors) comes from the mathematician Guido Zappa, who tackled this problem in the 1940s. A Zappatic surface (resp. a planar Zappatic surface) is a reduced connected surface which is union of smooth surfaces (resp. of planes), whose singularities are either global normal crossings or Zappatic singularities of type \(R_n\), \(S_n\) or \(E_n\), i.e. they are locally analytically isomorphic to the vertex of a cone over a union of lines whose dual graph is either a chain of length \(n\), or a fork with \(n-1\) teeth, or a cycle of order \(n\). The main result is the following: Assume that either \(d\geq 2\) if \(g=0\), or \(d\geq 5\) if \(g=1\), or \(d\geq 2g+4\) if \(g\geq 2\). Then there exists a unique irreducible component \(\mathcal{H}_{d,g}\) of the Hilbert scheme of scrolls of degree \(d\) and genus \(g\) in \(\mathbb P^{d-2g+1}\) such that the general point of \(\mathcal{H}_{d,g}\) represents a smooth scroll which is linearly normal and has \(H^1(S,\mathcal{O}_S(1))=0\). Furthermore, \(\mathcal{H}_{d,g}\) is generically reduced of dimension \((d-2g+2)^2+7(g-1)\), and it contains the Hilbert point of a planar Zappatic surface with only either \(d-2\) \(R_3\)--points if \(g=0\), or \(d-2g+2\) points of type \(R_3\) and \(2g-2\) points of type \(S_4\) if \(g\geq 1\), as Zappatic singularities. Moreover \(\mathcal{H}_{d,g}\) dominates the moduli space \(\mathcal{M}\) of smooth curves of genus \(g\). The proof uses induction and some smoothing techniques from \textit{C. Ciliberto} et al. [Invent. Math. 114, No. 3, 641--667 (1993; Zbl 0807.14028)]. Several examples are given and also the original approach of Zappa is discussed.