Demailly's conjecture on initial degrees of symbolic powers

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Let K\mathbb{K} be an algebraically closed field of characteristic 00. Let X⊆PKNX\subseteq \mathbb{P}^N_{\mathbb{K}} be a set of distinct points, and let a\mathfrak{a} be the defining homogeneous ideal of XX. For a homogeneous ideal JJ, write α(J)\alpha(J) for the least degree of a nonzero homogeneous element of JJ, and write a(s)\mathfrak{a}^{(s)} for its ssth symbolic power. Let rr be any positive integer.

Demailly's conjecture. For every integer s⩾1s\geqslant 1,

α(a(s))s⩾α(a(r))+N−1r+N−1.\frac{\alpha\left(\mathfrak{a}^{(s)}\right)}{s}\geqslant \frac{\alpha\left(\mathfrak{a}^{(r)}\right)+N-1}{r+N-1}.

This generalizes Chudnovsky's bound by allowing the right-hand side to use the initial degree of an arbitrary symbolic power. The supplied text attributes the generalization to Demailly and gives no evidence of resolution.

References

Primary source

Arvind Kumar and Vivek Mukundan, “Symbolic Powers of Classical Varieties”, arXiv:2402.18693 (2025).

Additional references

5 papers in this index state this conjecture (2017–2024). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2009.05022, arXiv:1811.02051, arXiv:1802.08699, arXiv:1701.04848.

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