English

On Wahl's proof of $\mu(6)=65$

Algebraic Geometry 2007-07-02 v1

Abstract

D. Jaffe and D. Ruberman proved in 1997 that a sextic hypersurface in P3\mathbb{P}^3 has at most 65 nodes (the bound is sharp by Barth's construction). Almost at the same time, J. Wahl proposed a much shorter proof of the same result, by proving that a linear code V\F66V\subset \F^{66} with weights in {24,32,40}\{24,32,40\} has dimension dim(V)12\dim(V)\leq12. He claimed that Jaffe-Ruberman's theorem follows as a corollary since the code associated to a sextic with n nodes has dimension at least n53n-53 and an incorrect result stated by Casnati and Catanese asserted that the possible cardinalities of an even set of nodes on a sextic were only 24, 32 and 40. Recently Catanese and Tonoli showed that the possible cardinalities of an even set of nodes on a sextic are exactly 24, 32, 40, 56. According to the above cardinalities, the theorem of Jaffe and Ruberman reduces to the following: Let V\F66V\subset \F^{66} be a code with weights in {24,32,40,56}\{24,32,40,56\}. Then dim(V)12\dim(V)\leq12. In this short note we give an elementary proof of this theorem using and integrating Wahl's ideas.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.0706.4358,
  title  = {On Wahl's proof of $\mu(6)=65$},
  author = {Roberto Pignatelli and Fabio Tonoli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.4358},
  year   = {2007}
}

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5 pages