Singularity of cubic hypersurfaces and hyperplane sections of projectivized tangent bundle of projective space

Abstract

We show that the normal points of a cubic hypersurface in projective space have canonical singularities unless the hypersurface is an iterated cone over an elliptic curve. As an application, we give a simple linear algebraic description of all the hyperplane sections of projectivized tangent bundle of projective space, hence describing hyperplane sections of a rational homogeneous manifold of Picard rank $2$. This also simplifies and extends recent results of Mazouni-Nagaraj in higher dimensions. We also compute the Chow ring of these hyperplane sections.

Final version; to appear in the "Proceedings of the AMS "