A note on rational curves on general Fano hypersurfaces

Abstract

We show the Kontsevich space of rational curves of degree at most roughly $\frac{2-\sqrt{2}}{2}n$ on a general hypersurface $X\subset {\mathbb{P}}^n$ of degree $n-1$ is equidimensional of expected dimension and has two components: one consisting generically of smooth, embedded rational curves and the other consisting of multiple covers of a line. This proves more cases of a conjecture of Coskun, Harris, and Starr and shows the Gromov-Witten invariants in these cases are enumerative.

arXiv comment18 pages, comments welcome, revised according to referee comments