The secant line variety to the varieties of reducible plane curves (Q268201)

Given a partition \([d_1,\dots,d_r]\) of the integer \(d\), the authors consider the variety \(X\) of forms \(F\) (= homogeneous polynomials) of degree \(d\), which split in a product of homogeneous factors \(F=F_1\cdots F_r\) of degrees \(d_1,\dots ,d_r\) respectively. In particular, the authors are interested in the behavior of secant varieties \(\sigma_k(X)\) to \(X\), with respect to the dimension. These secant varieties turn out to be useful for applications to the representation of forms and to the study of vector bundles on hypersurfaces. The authors mainly consider the case of the secant line variety \(\sigma_2(X)\), for forms \(F\) in \(3\) variables. They prove that the dimension of \(\sigma_2(X)\) has the expected value (i.e. \(X\) is not secant-defective) unless the partition is \textit{unbalanced}, i.e. unless, after ordering the integers so that \(d_1\geq d_2\geq \dots \geq d_r\), one has \(d_1\geq d_2+\dots +d_r\).