The Degree of Irrationality of Hypersurfaces in Various Fano Varieties
manuscripta math. 161, 377–408 (2020) © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 David Stapleton · Brooke Ullery The degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces in various Fano varieties Received: 3 May 2018 / Accepted: 21 December 2018 / Published online: 9 January 2019 Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to compute the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in various Fano varieties: quadrics, Grassmannians, products of projective space, cubic threefolds, cubic fourfolds, and complete intersection threefolds of type (2,2). This extends the techniques of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld, and the second author who computed the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in projective space. A theme in the paper is that the fibers of low degree rational maps from the hypersurfaces to projective space tend to lie on curves of low degree contained in the Fano varieties. This allows us to study these maps by studying the geometry of curves in these Fano varieties. Introduction The degree of irrationality of an n-dimensional algebraic variety X, denoted irr(X), is the minimal degree of a dominant rational map φ : XPn. The aim of this paper is to compute the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces in various Fano varieties: quadrics, cubic threefolds, cubic fourfolds, complete intersection threefolds of type (2,2), Grassmannians, and products of projective spaces. Throughout we work with varieties over C. Recently there has been a great deal of interest in understanding different mea- sures of irrationality of higher dimensional varieties. Bastianelli, Cortini, and De Poi conjectured ([1, Conj. 1.5]) that if X is a very general d hypersurface n+1 X = Xd ⊂ P with d ≥ 2n + 1, then irr(X) = d − 1.
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