Manifolds covered by lines and the Hartshorne Conjecture for quadratic manifolds

Abstract

Small codimensional embedded manifolds defined byequations of small degree are Fano and covered by lines. They are complete intersections exactly when the variety of lines through a general point is so and has the right codimension. This allows us to prove the Hartshorne Conjecture for manifolds defined by quadratic equations and to obtain the list of such Hartshorne manifolds.