Deformations of the tangent bundle of a projective hypersurface

Abstract

For a nonsingular hypersurface $X \subset \mathbb{P}^n, n \geq 4,$ of degree $d \geq 2$, we show that the space $H^1(X, \End(T_X))$ of infinitesimal deformations of the tangent bundle $T_X$ has dimension ${n+d-1 \choose d} (d-1)$ and all infinitesimal deformations are unobstructed even though $H^2(X, \End(T_X))$ can be nonzero. Furthermore, we prove that the irreducible component of the moduli space of stable bundles containing the tangent bundle is a rational variety, by constructing an explicit birational model.