TITLE: Can projective hypersurfaces contain linear spaces? How big?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: I am in this, rather friendly, situation:
I have a complex projective space $\mathbb{P}^n$, and there i have a (possibly non-smooth) hypersurface $S$ defined by one irreducible polynomial $P$ of degree $d$.
What i want is to get information about the existence or not of linear subvarieties of $S$, and their maximal dimension $m$.
I seem to remember the existence of some ways to get bounds on $m$, given $n$ and $d$, but i don't remember anymore and i don't know where to look..

REPLY [13 votes]: I think the key word you are looking for is Fano schemes of $S$. See this 
note by Jason Starr for a reference. For example, if $S$ is smooth and non-degenerate, it can not contain a linear subspace of dimension bigger than half $dim \ S$.
A very interesting related question is when can you find subvarieties of $S$ which was spanned in the Chow group by images of linear subspaces in $\mathbb P^n$. It was discussed in this paper by Levine, Esnault and Viehweg.

REPLY [9 votes]: I agree with Hailong, you want to look at Fano schemes.  Here's an article by Debarre and Manivel.  It's very good, and I've gotten a lot out of it despite note knowing much French.