Fano Schemes for Generic Sums of Products of Linear Forms

We study the Fano scheme of $k$-planes contained in the hypersurface cut out by a generic sum of products of linear forms. In particular, we show that under certain hypotheses, linear subspaces of sufficiently high dimension must be contained in a coordinate hyperplane. We use our results on these Fano schemes to obtain a lower bound for the product rank of a linear form. This provides a new lower bound for the product ranks of the $6\times 6$ Pfaffian and $4\times 4$ permanent, as well as giving a new proof that the product and tensor ranks of the $3\times 3$ determinant equal five. Based on our results, we formulate several conjectures.