Asymptotics of random Betti tables

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we present a conjecture to the effect that the ranks of the syzygy modules of a smooth projective variety become normally distributed as the positivity of the embedding line bundle grows. Then, in an attempt to render the conjecture plausible, we prove a result suggesting that this is in any event the typical behavior from a probabilistic point of view. Specifically, we consider a "random" Betti table with a fixed number of rows, sampled according to a uniform choice of Boij-Soderberg coefficients. We compute the asymptotics of the entries as the length of the table goes to infinity, and show that they become normally distributed with high probability

A vanishing theorem for weight one syzygies

Inspired by the methods of Voisin, the first two authors recently proved that one could read off the gonality of a curve C from the syzygies of its ideal in any one embedding of sufficiently large degree. This was deduced from from a vanishing theorem for the asymptotic syzygies associated to an arbitrary line bundle B on C. The present paper extends this vanishing theorem to a smooth projective variety X of arbitrary dimension. Specifically, given a line bundle B on X, we prove that if B is p-jet very ample (i.e. the sections of B separate jets of total weight p+1) then the weight one Koszul cohomology group K_{p,1}(X, B; L) vanishes for all sufficiently positive L. In the other direction, we show that if there is a reduced cycle of length p+1 that fails to impose independent conditions on sections of B, then the Koszul group in question is non-zero for very positive L.Comment: Heuristic outline of argument added. Small errors corrected. To appear in Algebra and Number Theor