Projective bundles of singular plane cubics

Abstract

Classification theory and the study of projective varieties which are covered by rational curves of minimal degrees naturally leads to the study of families of singular rational curves. Since families of arbitrarily singular curves are hard to handle, it has been shown in a previous paper that there exists a partial resolution of singularities which transforms a bundle of possibly badly singular curves into a bundle of nodal and cuspidal plane cubics. In cases which are of interest for classification theory, the total spaces of these bundles will clearly be projective. It is, however, generally false that an arbitrary bundle of plane cubics is globally projective. For that reason the question of projectivity seems to be of interest, and the present work gives a characterization of the projective bundles.