Complete intersections on Veronese surfaces

Abstract

In this paper we describe all possible reduced complete intersection sets of points on Veronese surfaces. We formulate a conjecture for the general case of complete intersection subvarieties of any dimension and we prove it in the case of the quadratic Veronese threefold. Our main tool is an effective characterization of all possible Hilbert functions of reduced subvarieties of Veronese surfaces.