English

Rationality proofs by curve counting

Algebraic Geometry 2018-12-11 v3

Abstract

We propose an approach for showing rationality of an algebraic variety XX. We try to cover XX by rational curves of certain type and count how many curves pass through a generic point. If the answer is 11, then we can sometimes reduce the question of rationality of XX to the question of rationality of a closed subvariety of XX. This approach is applied to the case of the so-called Ueno-Campana manifolds. Our experiments indicate that the previously open cases X4,6X_{4,6} and X5,6X_{5,6} are both rational. However, this result is not rigorously justified and depends on a heuristic argument and a Monte Carlo type computer simulation. In an unexpected twist, existence of lattices D6D_6, E8E_8 and Λ10\Lambda_{10} turns out to be crucial.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.02931,
  title  = {Rationality proofs by curve counting},
  author = {Anton Mellit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02931},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Corrected statement of main Lemma

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:40:25.070Z