Triple canonical covers of varieties of minimal degree.

Abstract

In this article we study pluriregular varieties X of general type with base-point-free canonical bundle whose canonical morphism has degree 3 and maps X onto a variety of minimal degree Y. We carry out our study from two different perspectives. First we study in Section 2 and Section 3 the canonical ring of X describing completely the degrees of its minimal generators. We apply this to the study of the projective normality of the images of the pluricanonical morphisms of X. Our study of the canonical ring of X also shows that, if the dimension of X is greater than or equal to 3, there does not exist a converse to a theorem of M. Green that bounds the degree of the generators of the canonical ring of X. This is in sharp contrast with the situation in dimension 2 where such converse exists, as proved by the authors in a previous work. Second, we study in Section 4, the structure of the canonical morphism of X. We use this to show among other things the nonexistence of some a priori plausible examples of triple canonical covers of varieties of minimal degree. We also characterize the targets of flat canonical covers of varieties of minimal degree. Some of the results of Section 4 are more general and apply to varieties X which are not necessarily regular, and to targets Y that are scrolls which are not of minimal degree.