A note on gonality of curves on general hypersurfaces

Abstract

This short paper concerns the existence of curves with low gonality on smooth hypersurfaces $$X\subset \mathbb {P}^{n+1}$$ . After reviewing a series of results on this topic, we report on a recent progress we achieved as a product of the Workshop Birational geometry of surfaces, held at University of Rome “Tor Vergata” on January 11th–15th, 2016. In particular, we obtained that if $$X\subset \mathbb {P}^{n+1}$$ is a very general hypersurface of degree $$d\geqslant 2n+2$$ , the least gonality of a curve $$C\subset X$$ passing through a general point of X is $$\mathrm {gon}(C)=d-\left\lfloor \frac{\sqrt{16n+1}-1}{2}\right\rfloor $$ , apart from some exceptions we list.