A bound on the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity for curves

Recall that a projective curve in with ideal sheaf is said to be n-regular if for every integer and that in this case, it is cut out scheme-theoretically by equations of degree at most n. The purpose here is to show that an irreducible, reduced, projective curve of degree d and large arithmetic genus satisfies a smaller regularity bound than the optimal one . For example, if then a curve is -regular unless it is embedded by a complete linear system of degree . Received: 29 May 2000 / Published online: 24 September 2001