Genus of curves in generic hypersurfaces

Abstract

This is the continuation of our paper [10]. In this paper which is self contained, we would like to give a different obstruction formula to the FIRST order deformation of the pair of a smooth curve and a smooth hypersurface. This obstruction formula leads to a genus formula for a smooth curve in a smooth hypersurface. As an application we show that smooth elliptic curves in a smooth hypersurface of degree $$h\geq 2n-1$$ in the projective space $\mathbf P^n, n\geq 3,$ can't deform in the first order to all hypersurfaces of the same degree. In particular, there are no smooth elliptic curves in generic hypersurfaces of degree $$h\geq 2n-1.$$ This application in return leads to a study of the deformation of the pair mentioned above.