Green's conjecture for general covers

Abstract

We establish Green's syzygy conjecture for classes of covers of curves of higher Clifford dimension. These curves have an infinite number of minimal pencils, in particular they do not verify a well-known Brill-Noether theoretic sufficient condition that implies Green's conjecture. Secondly, we study syzygies of curves with a fixed point free involution and prove that sections of Nikulin surfaces of minimal Picard number 9, verify the classical Green Conjecture but fail the Prym-Green Conjecture on syzygies of Prym-canonical curves. This provides an explicit locus in the moduli space R_g where Green's Conjecture is known to hold.