Homogeneous projective varieties with degenerate secants

The secant variety of a projective variety in , denoted by , is defined to be the closure of the union of lines in passing through at least two points of , and the secant deficiency of is defined by . We list the homogeneous projective varieties with under the assumption that arise from irreducible representations of complex simple algebraic groups. It turns out that there is no homogeneous, non-degenerate, projective variety with and , and the -variety is the only homogeneous projective variety with largest secant deficiency . This gives a negative answer to a problem posed by R. Lazarsfeld and A. Van de Ven if we restrict ourselves to homogeneous projective varieties.