On spinor varieties and their secants

Laurent Manivel

Published 2009-04-03, updated 2009-07-24Version 2

We study the secant variety of the spinor variety, focusing on its equations of degree three and four. We show that in type $D_n$, cubic equations exist if and only if $n\ge 9$. In general the ideal has generators in degrees at least three and four. Finally we observe that the other Freudenthal varieties exhibit strikingly similar behaviors.