Terminal singularities of the moduli space of curves on low degree hypersurfaces and the circle method

Abstract

We study the singularities of the moduli space of degree $e$ maps from smooth genus $g$ curves to an arbitrary smooth hypersurface of low degree. For $e$ large compared to $g$, we show that these moduli spaces have at worst terminal singularities. Our main approach is to study the jet schemes of these moduli spaces by developing a suitable form of the circle method.