Refining Castelnuovo-Halphen bounds (Q693210)

It is known that the arithmetic genus of projective curves \(C\subset\mathbb P^r\) is bounded by functions which depend on the projective invariants of the embedding. When \(C\) is a curve in \(\mathbb P^3\), a lower bound for the genus in terms of the degree \(d\) and the number \(s\) such that \(C\) does not lie on surfaces of degree \(\leq s\), goes back to the classical works of Halphen. The bound was proved, when \(d\gg s\), by Gruson--Peskine in the 70s, and more recently extended to curves in arbitrary projective spaces. The authors present a refinement of the bound for the genus. Namely, they introduce into the picture the sectional genus of a surface containing \(C\). Their main result is a lower bound for the arithmetic genus of curves in \(\mathbb P^r\) of degree \(d\), which are not contained in surfaces of degree \(<s\) neither in surfaces of degree \(s\) and sectional genus \(<\pi\) (in the range \(r-1\leq s\leq 2r-4\), \(\pi\leq s-r+1\), \(d\) bigger of a function \(d_0(r)\)). The bound is achieved by an examination of the possible Hilbert functions for the curve \(C\). Furthermore, the authors prove the sharpness of their bound.