On the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of connected curves

Abstract

In this paper we prove the Eisenbud-Goto conjecture for connected curves. We also investigate the structure of connected curves for which this bound is optimal. In particular, we construct connected curves of arbitrarily high degree in projective 4-space having maximal regularity, but no extremal secants. We also show that any connected curve in projective 3-space of degree at least 5 that has no linear components and has maximal regularity has an extremal secant.