Bertini theorems for hypersurface sections containing a subscheme over finite fields

Abstract

We show the existence of a hypersurface that contains a given closed subscheme of a projective space over a finite field and intersects a smooth quasi-projective scheme smoothly, under some condition on the dimension. This generalizes a Bertini theorem by Poonen and is the finite field analogue of a Bertini theorem by Altman and Kleiman. Furthermore, we add the possibility of modifying finitely many local conditions of the hypersurface. We show that the condition on the dimension is fulfilled for schemes with simple normal crossings and give an application to embeddings into smooth schemes.