Theorems of Barth-Lefschetz type on Kaehler manifolds of non-negative bisectional curvature

Theorems of Barth-Lefschetz type describe restrictions on the topology of varieties of small codimension. R. Schoen and J. Wolfson, using Morse theory on a path space, have described a technique to prove theorems of this kind for complex submanifolds of K\"ahler manifolds of non-negative holomorphic bisectional curvature. In this paper this program is carried out for the compact Hermitian symmetric spaces. The key technical point is to define and compute an invariant, called the {\it complex positivity}, that measures the ``amount'' of positive curvature, in a suitable sense.