On the identifiability of binary Segre products

Abstract

We prove that a product of $m>5$ copies of $\PP^1$, embedded in the projective space $\PP^r$ by the standard Segre embedding, is $k$-identifiable (i.e. a general point of the secant variety $S^k(X)$ is contained in only one $(k+1)$-secant $k$-space), for all $k$ such that $k+1\leq 2^{m-1}/m$.

to appear in the Journal of Algebraic Geometry