A Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity bound for threefolds with rational singularities

The purpose of this paper is to establish a Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity bound for threefolds with mild singularities. Let $X$ be a non-degenerate normal projective threefold in $\mathbb{P}^r$ of degree $d$ and codimension $e$. We prove that if $X$ has rational singularities, then $\text{reg}(X) \leq d-e+2$. Our bound is very close to a sharp bound conjectured by Eisenbud-Goto. When $e=2$ and $X$ has Cohen-Macaulay Du Bois singularities, we obtain the conjectured bound $\text{reg}(X) \leq d-1$, and we also classify the extremal cases. To achieve these results, we bound the regularity of fibers of a generic projection of $X$ by using Loewy length, and also bound the dimension of the varieties swept out by secant lines through the singular locus of $X$.
Comment: 17 pages, to appear in Adv. Math