Secant varieties and successive minima

Abstract

Given an arithmetic surface and a positive hermitian line bundle over it, we bound the successive minima of the lattice of global sections of this line bundle. Our method combines a result of C.Voisin on secant varieties of projective curves with previous work by the author on the arithmetic analog of the Kodaira vanishing theorem. The paper also includes a result of A.Granville on the divisibility properties of binomial coefficients in a given line of Pascal's triangle.