Abstract : Positivity of the tangent bundle and its top exterior power (namely, the anticanonical bundle) is the subject of extensive literature, and several open problems. Notably, Campana and Peternell predict that if $-K_{X}$ is strictly nef, then $X$ is a Fano variety: this conjecture is proven up to dimension 3 by the work of Maeda and Serrano. In this talk, we investigate positivity of the intermediate exterior powers of the tangent bundle. We prove that if $X$ is a smooth projective n-fold and the third, fourth or (n-1)-th exterior power of $T_{X}$ is strictly nef, then $X$ is a Fano variety. Moreover, we classify smooth projective varieties of Picard number at least two with third or fourth exterior power of $T_{X}$ strictly nef. This work is actually slightly more general, as it boils down to classifying rationally connected varieties such that the degree of the anticanonical bundle on rational curves is quite large.

Keywords : rationally connected manifolds; Fano varieties; positivity of the tangent bundle