The enumerative geometry of cubic hypersurfaces: point and line conditions

Abstract

The set of smooth cubic hypersurfaces in Pn\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$${{\\mathbb {P}}}^n$$\\end{document} is an open subset of a projective space. A compactification of the latter which allows to count the number of smooth cubic hypersurfaces tangent to a prescribed number of lines and passing through a given number of points is termed a 1–complete variety of cubic hypersurfaces, in analogy with the space of complete quadrics. Imitating the work of Aluffi for plane cubic curves, we construct such a space in arbitrary dimensions by a sequence of five blow-ups. The counting problem is then reduced to the computation of five total Chern classes. In the end, we derive the desired numbers in the case of cubic surfaces.