The Alpha Problem & Line Count Configurations

Abstract

Motivated by the work of Chudnovsky and the Eisenbud-Mazur Conjecture on evolutions, Harbourne and Huneke give a series of conjectures that relate symbolic and regular powers of ideals of fat points in $\mathbb P^n$. The conjectures involve both containment statements and bounds for the initial degree in which there is a non-zero form in an ideal. Working with initial degrees, we verify two of these conjectures for special line count configurations in projective 2-space over an algebraically closed field of characteristic 0.