Scanning the moduli of smooth hypersurfaces

Abstract We study the locus of smooth hypersurfaces inside the Hilbert scheme of a smooth projective complex variety. In the spirit of scanning, we construct a map to a continuous section space of a projective bundle, and show that it induces an isomorphism in integral homology in a range of degrees growing with the ampleness of the hypersurfaces. When the ambient variety is a curve, this recovers a result of McDuff about configuration spaces. We compute the rational cohomology of the section space and exhibit a homological stability phenomenon for hypersurfaces with first Chern class going to infinity. For simply connected varieties, the rational cohomology is shown to agree with the stable cohomology of a moduli space of hypersurfaces, with a peculiar tangential structure, as studied by Galatius and Randal-Williams.