Ordinary holomorphic webs in codimension one (Q2883324)

To any \(d\)-web of codimension one on a holomorphic \(n\)-dimensional manifold \(M(d>n)\), we associate an analytic subset \(S\) of \(M\). We call ordinary the webs for which \(S\) has a dimension at most \(n-1\) or is empty. This condition is generically satisfied, at least at the level of germs.NEWLINENEWLINEWe prove that the rank of an ordinary \(d\)-web has an upper-bound \(\pi'(n,d)\) which, for \(n\geq 3\), is strictly smaller than the bound \(\pi(n,d)\) proved by Chern, \(\pi(n,d)\) denoting the Castelnuovo number. This bound is optimal.NEWLINENEWLINESetting \(c(n,h)={n-1+h \choose h}\), let \(k_0\) be the integer such that \(c(n,k_0)\leq d<c(n,k_0 +1)\). The number \(\pi'(n,d)\) is then equalNEWLINENEWLINE-- to 0 for \(d<c(n,2)\),NEWLINENEWLINE-- and to \(\sum^{k_0}_{h=1}(d-c(n,h))\) for \(d\geq c(n,2)\).NEWLINENEWLINEMoreover, if \(d\) is precisely equal to \(c(n,k_0)\), we define off \(S\) a holomorphic connection on a holomorphic bundle \({\mathcal E}\) of rank \(\pi'(n,d)\), such that the set of abelian relations off \(S\) is isomorphic to the set of holomorphic sections of \({\mathcal E}\) with vanishing covariant derivative: the curvature of this connection, which generalizes the Blaschke curvature, is then an obstruction for the rank of the web to reach the value \(\pi'(n,d)\).NEWLINENEWLINEWhen \(n=2\), \(S\) is always empty so that any web is ordinary, \(\pi'(2,d)=\pi(2,d)\), and any \(d\) may be written \(c(2,k_0)\): we recover the results given in \textit{A. Hénaut} [Ann. Math. (2) 159, No. 1, 425--445 (2004; Zbl 1069.53020)].