The dimension growth conjecture, polynomial in the degree and without logarithmic factors

We address Heath-Brown's and Serre's dimension growth conjecture (proved by Salberger), when the degree $d$ grows. Recall that Salberger's dimension growth results give bounds of the form $O_{X, \varepsilon} (B^{\dim X+\varepsilon})$ for the number of rational points of height at most $B$ on any integral subvariety $X$ of ${\mathbb P}^n_{\mathbb Q}$ of degree $d\geq 2$, where one can write $O_{d,n, \varepsilon}$ instead of $O_{X, \varepsilon}$ as soon as $d\geq 4$. Our main contribution is to remove the factor $B^\varepsilon$ as soon as $d \geq 5$, without introducing a factor $\log B$, while moreover obtaining polynomial dependence on $d$ of the implied constant. Working polynomially in $d$ allows us to give a self-contained and slightly simplified treatment of dimension growth for degree $d \geq 16$, while in the range $5 \leq d \leq 15$ we invoke results by Browning, Heath-Brown and Salberger. Along the way we improve the well-known bounds due to Bombieri and Pila on the number of integral points of bounded height on affine curves and those by Walsh on the number of rational points of bounded height on projective curves. The former improvement leads to a slight sharpening of a recent estimate due to Bhargava, Shankar, Taniguchi, Thorne, Tsimerman and Zhao on the size of the $2$-torsion subgroup of the class group of a degree $d$ number field. Our treatment builds on recent work by Salberger which brings in many primes in Heath-Brown's variant of the determinant method, and on recent work by Walsh and Ellenberg--Venkatesh, who bring in the size of the defining polynomial. We also obtain lower bounds showing that one cannot do better than polynomial dependence on $d$.