Ramification divisors of general projections

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Publication:2209882



Abstract: We study the ramification divisors of projections of a smooth projective variety onto a linear subspace of the same dimension. We prove that the ramification divisors vary in a maximal dimensional family for a large class of varieties. Going further, we study the map that associates to a linear projection its ramification divisor. We show that this map is dominant for most (but not all!) varieties of minimal degree, using (linked) limit linear series of higher rank. We find the degree of this map in some cases, extending the classical appearance of Catalan numbers in the geometry of rational normal curves, and give a geometric explanation of its fibers in terms of torsion points of naturally occurring elliptic curves in the case of the Veronese surface and the quartic rational surface scroll.


Let \(X\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) be a smooth projective variety of dimension \(r\), not contained in a hyperplane, and let \(L\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) be a general linear subspace of codimension \(r+1\). The projection from \(L\) defines a finite surjective map \(\pi:X\rightarrow\mathbb{P}^{r}\) with ramification divisor \(R(L)\in|K_{X}-\pi^{*}K_{\mathbb{P}^{r}}|\). The paper deals with the rational map \(\rho\) sending linear subspaces \(L\) to \(R(L)\), called the projection-ramification map. In the first result, the authors give two sufficient conditions for \(\rho\) to be generically finite onto its image. The first condition is incompressibility: that is for every \(L\) the projection restricts to a dominant rational map \(X\dashrightarrow\mathbb{P}^{r}\). This condition implies that \(\rho\) is a morphism, and it must be finite. The second condition is that the dual variety of \(X\) is a hypersurface. The proof of this condition is more difficult and uses properties of non-defective linear series. Other results are dedicated to the case when \(X\) is a scroll. The reason is that for varieties \(X\) of minimal degree the dimension of the linear system \(|K_{X}-\pi^{*}K_{\mathbb{P}^{r}}|\) is equal to the dimension of the Grassmannian \(\mathrm{Gr}(n-r,n+1)\). The authors proves that there exists a rational normal scroll \(X\subset\mathbb{P}^{n}\) of every dimension \(r\ge4\) and degree \(d\ge r+1\) for which the projection-ramification map \(\rho\) is not generically finite onto its image. In the last section, the projection-ramification map of some particular scroll is described in detail. But the main theorem is that for generic scrolls of high degree, the projection-ramification map is finite onto its image. This is proved in the following way. First of all, using linked limit linear series they defines a variant of the projection-ramification map. After that, they degenerate a vector bundle \(E\) to a vector bundle on a nodal curve, and show that \(\rho\) is dominant for the degenerated vector bundle.





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