On the extendability of projective surfaces and a genus bound for Enriques-Fano threefolds

We introduce a new technique, based on Gaussian maps, to study the possibility, for a given surface, to lie on a threefold as a very ample divisor with given normal bundle. We give several applications, among which one to surfaces of general type and another one to Enriques surfaces. For the latter we prove that any threefold (with no assumption on its singularities) having as hyperplane section a smooth Enriques surface (by definition an Enriques-Fano threefold) has genus g < 18 (where g is the genus of its smooth curve sections). The latter bound was also proved recently by Prokhorov, who also found an example of genus 17. Moreover we find a new Enriques-Fano threefold of genus 9 whose normalization has canonical but not terminal singularities and does not admit Q-smoothings.