Fano manifolds with big tangent bundle: a characterisation of \(V_5\) (Q6165277)

A projective manifold is said to be Fano if its anti-canonical line bundle is ample. After Mori's solution to Hartshorne conjecture, the classification of Fano manifolds with certain positivity condition has attracted lots of attention. In the paper under review, the authors give a description on the Fano manifold of Picard number 1 whose tangent bundle is big, i.e., the tautological line bundle of the projectivised tangent bundle is a big divisor. More precisely, the authors show that for a Fano manifold \(X\) of Picard number 1 whose tangent bundle is big, it contains a rational curve with trivial normal bundle if and only if it is isomorphic to the quintic del Pezzo threefold \(V_5\), i.e., a smooth codimension 3 linear section of the Grassmannian \(\mathrm{Gr}(2,5)\subseteq\mathbb{P}^9\) in its Plücker embedding (see Theorem 1.1). Consequently, the authors classify the smooth Fano threefold of Picard number 1 whose tangent bundle is big, that is, \((1)\) the projective space \(\mathbb{P}^3\); (2) the smooth quadric threefold \(Q^3\subseteq \mathbb{P}^4\); or (3) the quintic del Pezzo threefold \(V_5\) (see Corollary 1.2). To prove the main theorem, the authors make use of the theory of minimal rational curves and analyze the saturated subsheaf given by the linear span of the tangent directions of the minimal rational curves; moreover, the authors develop a technical tool to show the rank of this distribution has rank three so that a theorem of Peternell concludes that the dimension of the Fano manifold \(X\) is no more than 3.