The gonality conjecture on syzygies of algebraic curves of large degree

Abstract

We show that a small variant of the methods used by Voisin in her study of canonical curves leads to a surprisingly quick proof of the gonality conjecture of Green and the second author, asserting that one can read off the gonality of a curve C from its resolution in the embedding defined by any one line bundle of sufficiently large degree. More generally, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the asymptotic vanishing of the weight one syzygies of the module associated to an arbitrary line bundle on C.