Determinantal equations for secant varieties and the Eisenbud-Koh-Stillman conjecture

We address special cases of a question of Eisenbud on the ideals of secant varieties of Veronese re-embeddings of arbitrary varieties. Eisenbud’s question generalizes a conjecture of Eisenbud, Koh and Stillman (EKS) for curves. We prove that set-theoretic equations of small secant varieties to a high degree Veronese re-embedding of a smooth variety are determined by equations of the ambient Veronese variety and linear equations. However this is false for singular varieties, and we give explicit counter-examples to the EKS conjecture for singular curves. The techniques we use also allow us to prove a gap and uniqueness theorem for symmetric tensor rank. We put Eisenbud’s question in a more general context about the behaviour of border rank under specialisation to a linear subspace, and provide an overview of conjectures coming from signal processing and complexity theory in this context.