Irreducibility of the Hilbert scheme of smooth curves in \(\mathbb {P}^3\) of degree \(g\) and genus \(g\) (Q2628058)

This paper gives irreducibility results on Hilbert schemes of space curves. Let \(H_{d,g}\) denote the Hilbert scheme parametrizing smooth connected curves \(C \subset \mathbb P^3\) of degree \(d\) and genus \(g\). Confirming part of a claim of Severi, \textit{L. Ein} showed that \(H_{d,g}\) is irreducible for \(d \geq g+3\) [Ann. Scient. Ec. Norm. Sup. 19, 469--478 (1986; Zbl 0606.14003)]. The authors proved irreducibility of \(H_{d,g}\) for \(d=g+2, g \geq 5\) and \(d=g+1, g \geq 11\) [J. Algebra 145, 240--248 (1992; Zbl 0783.14002)] and \textit{H. Iliev} proved that \(H_{g,g}\) is irreducible for \(g \geq 13\) [Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 134, 2823--2832 (2006; Zbl 1097.14022)]. Here the authors complete Iliev's result, showing that every non-empty \(H_{g,g}\) is irreducible. Noting that \(H_{g,g}\) is empty for \(1 \leq g \leq 7\) and irreducible for \(g=8\) and \(9\) by \textit{K. Dasaratha} [``The reducibility and dimension of Hilbert schemes of complex projective curves'', undergraduate thesis, Harvard University, Department of Mathematics, available at \url{http://www.math.harvard.edu/theses/senior/dasaratha/dasaratha}], the authors need only consider \(g \geq 10\). Here they build on the proof of Iliev [loc. cit.], making a careful study of an irreducible component \(\mathcal G\) of the space \(\mathcal G_g^3\) of pairs \((C,D)\) with \(C\) a smooth connected curve and \(D\) a linear series of degree \(g\) and dimension \(3\) whose general element is very ample. The key result here is that \(D\) is in fact a complete linear system of dimension \(4g-15\) and that the general member of the component of the residual series is base point free, complete, and birationally very ample.