Related papers: A very general quartic double fourfold or fivefold…

We exhibit families of smooth projective threefolds with both stably rational and non stably rational fibers.

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 prove non-rationality and birational super-rigidity of a Q-factorial double cover X of P^3 ramified along a sextic surface with at most simple double points. We also show that the condition #|Sing(X)| < 15 implies Q-factoriality of X. In…

We prove that smooth quartic threefolds are symplectically irrational, i.e., cannot be related to projective space by a series of symplectic blow-ups, blow-downs, and deformations. This implies that they are algebraically irrational,…

For a general cubic fourfold $X\subset\mathbb{P}^5$ with Fano scheme of lines $F$, we prove a number of properties of the universal family of lines $I\to F$ and various subloci. We first describe the moduli and ramification theory of the…

A double cover $Y$ of $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^2$ ramified over a general $(2,2)$-divisor will have the structure of a geometrically standard conic bundle ramified over a smooth plane quartic $\Delta \subset \mathbb{P}^2$ via the…

Here is a square problem: in a unit square, is there a point with four rational distances to the vertices? A probability argument suggests a negative answer. This paper proves several special cases of the square problem: if the point sits…

In this paper the notion of rational simple connectedness for the quintic Fano threefold $V_5\subset \mathbb{P}^6$ is studied and unirationality of the moduli spaces $\overline{M}_{0,0}^{\text{bir}}(V_5,d)$, with $d \ge 1$, is proved. Many…

Let X be a non-singular projective hypersurface of degree 4, which is defined over the rational numbers. Assume that X has dimension 39 or more, and that X contains a real point and p-adic points for every prime p. Then X is shown to…

We show that a very general (3,3) complete intersection in $\mathbb{P}^7$ over an algebraically closed uncountable field of characteristic different from 2 admits no decomposition of the diagonal, in particular it is not retract rational.…

We find a relation between a cubic hypersurface $Y$ and its Fano variety of lines $F(Y)$ in the Grothendieck ring of varieties. We prove that if the class of an affine line is not a zero-divisor in the Grothendieck ring of varieties, then…

Nicaise--Ottem introduced the notion of (stably) rational polytopes and studied this using a combinatorial description of the motivic volume. In this framework, we ask whether being non-stably rational is preserved under inclusions. We…

We show that the degrees of rational endomorphisms of very general complex Fano and Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces satisfy certain congruence conditions by specializing to characteristic p. As a corollary we show that very general n-dimensional…

In this paper we define the notion of a hyperk\"ahler manifold (potentially) of Jacobian type. If we view hyperk\"ahler manifolds as "abelian varieties", then those of Jacobian type should be viewed as "Jacobian varieties". Under a minor…

A very general hypersurface of dimension $n$ and degree $d$ in complex projective space is rational if $d \leq 2$, but is expected to be irrational for all $n, d \geq 3$. Hypersurfaces in weighted projective space with degree small relative…

The main aim of this article is to show that a very general 3-dimensional del Pezzo fibration of degree 1,2,3 is not stably rational except for a del Pezzo fibration of degree 3 belonging to explicitly described 2 families. Higher…

This is a survey on (lack of) stable rationality over arbitrary fields (including algebraically closed fields). Topics addressed include: Rationality and unirationality, R-equivalence on rational points, Chow groups of zero-cycles, Galois…

Some classes of cubic fourfolds are birational to fibrations over $P^2$, where the fibers are rational surfaces. This is the case for cubics containing a plane (resp. an elliptic ruled surface), where the fibers are quadric surfaces (resp.…

We prove the birational superrigidity and the nonrationality of a cyclic triple cover of $\mathbb{P}^{2n}$ branched over a nodal hypersurface of degree $3n$ for $n\ge 2$. In particular, the obtained result solves the problem of the…

We study the rationality of some geometrically rational three-dimensional conic and quadric surface bundles, defined over the reals and more general real closed fields, for which the real locus is connected and the intermediate Jacobian…