Related papers: The discriminant of a cubic surface

We study the surface $\bar{S}$ parametrizing cuboids: it is defined by the equations relating the sides, face diagonals and long diagonal of a rectangular box. It is an open problem whether a `rational box' exists, i.e., a rectangular box…

Jordan showed that the incidence variety of a smooth cubic surface containing 27 lines has solvable Galois group over the incidence variety of a smooth cubic surface containing 3 skew lines. As noted by Harris, it follows that for any…

The Galois group of a family of cubic surfaces is the monodromy group of the 27 lines of its generic fibre. We describe a method to compute this group for linear systems of cubic surfaces using certified numerical computations. Applying…

We report on our project to construct non-singular cubic surfaces over $\bbQ$ with a rational line. Our method is to start with degree 4 Del Pezzo surfaces in diagonal form. For these, we develop an explicit version of Galois descent.

To a family of smooth projective cubic surfaces one can canonically associate a family of abelian fivefolds. In characteristic zero, we calculate the Hodge groups of the abelian varieties which arise in this way. In arbitrary characteristic…

We express the Hessian discriminant of a cubic surface in terms of fundamental invariants. This answers Question 15 from the \emph{27 questions on the cubic surface}. We also explain how to compute the fundamental invariants for smooth…

The Eckardt hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^{19}$ parameterizes smooth cubic surfaces with an Eckardt point, which is a point common to three of the $27$ lines on a smooth cubic surface. We describe the cubic surfaces lying on the singular…

Cubic surfaces in characteristic two are investigated from the point of view of prime characteristic commutative algebra. In particular, we prove that, the non-Frobenius split cubic surfaces form a linear subspace of codimension four in the…

We explore the connection between the rank of a polynomial and the singularities of its vanishing locus. We first describe the singularity of generic polynomials of fixed rank. We then focus on cubic surfaces. Cubic surfaces with isolated…

Cubic fourfolds of discriminant 24 contain special codimension-two algebraic cycles of degree 6 and self-intersection 20. Such cycles may be represented by singular scrolls or del Pezzo surfaces. A discriminant 24 cubic fourfold gives rise…

We investigate monodromy groups arising in enumerative geometry, with a particular focus on how these groups are influenced by prescribed symmetries. To study these phenomena effectively, we work in the framework of moduli stacks rather…

We study lines on smooth cubic surfaces over the field of $p$-adic numbers, from a theoretical and computational point of view. Segre showed that the possible counts of such lines are $0,1,2,3,5,7,9,15$ or $27$. We show that each of these…

We find a tight relationship between the torsion subgroup and the image of the mod 2 Galois representation associated to an elliptic curve defined over the rationals. This is shown using some characterizations for the squareness of the…

We give an explicit formula for the $27$ lines of a smooth cubic surface near the Fermat surface. Our formula involves convergent power series with coefficients in the extension of rational numbers with the sixth root of unity. Our main…

Let $\Bbbk$ be any field of characteristic zero, $X$ be a cubic surface in $\mathbb{P}^3_{\Bbbk}$ and $G$ be a group acting on $X$. We show that if $X(\Bbbk) \ne \varnothing$ and $G$ is not trivial and not a group of order $3$ acting in a…

We prove that the enumerative geometry of lines on smooth cubic surfaces is governed by the arithmetic of the base field. In 1949, Segre proved that the number of lines on a smooth cubic surface over any field is 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, or…

Let X be a projective cubic hypersurface of dimension 11 or more, which is defined over the rationals. In this paper it is shown that X contains rational points provided that the cubic form defining X can be written as the sum of two forms…

We consider diagonal cubic surfaces defined by an equation of the form ax^3+by^3+cz^3+dt^3 = 0. Numerically, one can find all rational points of height < B for B in the range of up to 100 000, thanks to a program due to D. J. Bernstein. On…

We compute and study two determinantal representations of the discriminant of a cubic quaternary form. The first representation is the Chow form of the $2$-uple embedding of $\mathbb{P}^3$ and is computed as the Pfaffian of the Chow form of…

We show that any smooth projective cubic hypersurface of dimension at least $29$ over the rationals contains a rational line. A variation of our methods provides a similar result over p-adic fields. In both cases, we improve on previous…