Related papers: (Stable) rationality is not deformation invariant

We prove that a double covering of P^3 branched along a very general sextic surface is not stably rational.

Under some positivity assumptions, extension properties of rationally connected fibrations from a submanifold to its ambient variety are studied. Given a family of rational curves on a complex projective manifold X inducing a covering…

We study (smooth, complex) Fano 4-folds X having a rational contraction of fiber type, that is, a rational map X-->Y that factors as a sequence of flips followed by a contraction of fiber type. The existence of such a map is equivalent to…

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…

Let $X$ be a cubic fourfold in $P^5_{C}$. We prove that, assuming the Hodge conjecture for the product $S \times S$, where $S$ is a complex surface, and the finite dimensionality of the Chow motive $h(S)$, there are at most a countable…

We prove that there exist rational but not uniformly rational smooth algebraic varieties. The proof is based on computing a certain numerical obstruction developed in the case of compactifications of affine spaces. We show that for some…

This is an expository article, which contributes to the Proceedings of the conference "Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry", held in Trento in 2012. We propose that (rational) fibrations on the projective space $\p^n$…

F. Campana had asked whether a certain threefold is rational. In arXiv:1310.3569v1 [mathAG], this variety was shown to be birational to a specific conic bundle and then to be unirational. We prove that this conic bundle is rational.

We prove several results about the behavior Du Bois singularities and Du Bois pairs in families. Some of these generalize existing statements about Du Bois singularities to the pair setting while others are new even in the non-pair setting.…

We prove that in a family of projective threefolds defined over an algebraically closed field, the locus of rational fibers is a countable union of closed subsets of the locus of separably rationally connected fibers. When the ground field…

We show that rationality does not specialize in flat projective families of complex fourfolds with terminal singularities. This answers a question of Totaro, who established the analogous result in all dimensions greater than 4.

We classify all positive integers n and r such that (stably) non-rational complex r-fold quadric bundles over rational n-folds exist. We show in particular that for any n and r, a wide class of smooth r-fold quadric bundles over projective…

We prove that a very general nonsingular conic bundle $X\rightarrow\mathbb{P}^{n-1}$ embedded in a projective vector bundle of rank $3$ over $\mathbb{P}^{n-1}$ is not stably rational if the anti-canonical divisor of $X$ is not ample and…

A limit of rational varieties need not be rational, even if all varieties in the family are projective and have at most terminal singularities.

The main aim of this paper is to show that a cyclic cover of $\mathbb{P}^n$ branched along a very general divisor of degree $d$ is not stably rational provided that $n \ge 3$ and $d \ge n+1$. This generalizes the result of…

We study the birational geometry of a Fano 4-fold X from the point of view of Mori dream spaces; more precisely, we study rational contractions of X. Here a rational contraction is a rational map f: X-->Y, where Y is normal and projective,…

We complete the study of rationality problem for hypersurfaces $X_t\subset \mathbb{P}^4$ of degree $4$ invariant under the action of the symmetric group $S_6$.

It is proved that the non-rationality of a generic cubic fourfold follows from a conjecture on the non-decomposability in the direct sum of non-trivial polarized Hodge structures of the polarized Hodge structure on transcendental cycles on…

We show that a smooth projective complex manifold of dimension greater than two endowed with an elliptic fiber space structure and with finite fundamental group always contains a rational curve, provided its canonical bundle is relatively…

In this short note we prove that in many cases the failure of a variety to be separably rationally connected is caused by the instability of the tangent sheaf (if there are no other obvious reasons). A simple application of the results…