Abstract. We prove that there are only finitely many families of codimension two nonsingular subvarieties of quadrics Q n which are not of general type, for n = 5 and n ≥ 7. We prove a similar statement also for the case of higher codimension.
IntroductionThere are only finitely many families of codimension two nonsingular subvarieties not of general type of the projective spaces P n , for n ≥ 4; see [7] and [4]. More generally, a similar statement holds for the case of higher codimension; see [16].In this paper we concentrate on the case of codimension two subvarieties of quadrics. Our main result is Theorem 4.3: there are only finitely many families of nonsingular codimension two subvarieties not of general type in the quadrics Q n , n = 4, 5 or n ≥ 7. The case n = 4 is proved in [1], §6. The case of n = 5 is at the heart of the paper; the main tools are the semipositivity of the normal bundles of nonsingular subvarieties of quadrics, the double point formula, the generalized Hodge index theorem, bounds for the genus of curves on Q 3 , Proposition 1.5 and Corollary 3.4. The case n = 6 is still open 1 . The case of codimension two with n ≥ 7 is covered by Theorem 2.1, which hinges upon the result of [16]; it also gives a finiteness result in codimension bigger than two in the same spirit as [16].The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 records, for the reader's convenience, some results used in the paper. A generalization of a lifting criterion of Roth's is contained in section 1.1; we shall need the particular case expressed by Proposition 1.4. Section 2 deals with higher codimensional cases. Sections 3 and 4 are modeled on [4]. Section 3 contains the lengthy proof of Theorem 3.1 and of its Corollary 3.4. Section 4 contains the proof of Theorem 4.3.
Notation and conventions.Our basic reference is [10]. We work over any algebraically closed field of characteristic zero. A quadric Q n , here, is a nonsingular hypersurface of degree two in the projective space P n+1 . Little or no distinction is made between line bundles, associated sheaves of sections and Cartier divisors; moreover the additive and tensor notation are both used.