Isotropic and coisotropic subvarieties of Grassmannians

Abstract

We generalize the notion of coisotropic hypersurfaces to subvarieties of Grassmannians having arbitrary codimension. To every projective variety X, Gel'fand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky associate a series of coisotropic hypersurfaces in different Grassmannians. These include the Chow form and the Hurwitz form of X. Gel'fand, Kapranov and Zelevinsky characterized coisotropic hypersurfaces by a rank one condition on conormal spaces, which we use as the starting point for our generalization. We also study the dual notion of isotropic varieties by imposing rank one conditions on tangent spaces instead of conormal spaces.