Related papers: Burkhardt quartic, Barth sextic, and the icosahedr…
In this paper the ubiquity of the Igusa quartic $B \subset \mathbb P^4$ shows up again, this time related to the Prym map $\mathfrak p : \mathcal R_6 \to \mathcal A_5$. We introduce the moduli space $\mathcal X$ of those quartic threefolds…
We show that five of Reid's Fano 3-fold hyperurfaces containing at least one compound Du Val singularity of type $cA_n$ have pliability at least two. The two elements of the pliability set are the singular hypersurface itself, and another…
We give uniform, explicit, and simple face-pairing descriptions of all the branched cyclic covers of the 3-sphere, branched over two-bridge knots. Our method is to use the bi-twisted face-pairing constructions of Cannon, Floyd, and Parry;…
We study symplectic geometry of rationally connected $3$-folds. The first result shows that rationally connectedness is a symplectic deformation invariant in dimension $3$. If a rationally connected $3$-fold $X$ is Fano or $b_2(X)=2$, we…
In this paper we give first examples of $\mathbb{Q}$-Fano threefolds whose birational Mori fiber structures consist of exactly three $\mathbb{Q}$-Fano threefolds. These examples are constructed as weighted hypersurfaces in a specific…
We prove that the Fano variety of lines of a generic cubic fourfold containing a plane is isomorphic to a moduli space of twisted stable complexes on a K3 surface. On the other hand, we show that the Fano varieties are always birational to…
O'Grady showed that certain special sextics in $\mathbb{P}^5$ called EPW sextics admit smooth double covers with a holomorphic symplectic structure. We propose another perspective on these symplectic manifolds, by showing that they can be…
We prove that a smooth Fano hypersurface $V=V_M\subset{\Bbb P}^M$, $M\geq 6$, is birationally superrigid. In particular, it cannot be fibered into uniruled varieties by a non-trivial rational map and each birational map onto a minimal Fano…
In a previous paper, the authors showed the advantages of building a $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$-action into an $F$-theory model $W_{4}/B_{3}$, namely the action of complex conjugation on the complex algebraic group with compact real form $E_{8}$. The…
We prove rationality criteria over algebraically non-closed fields of characteristic $0$ for five out of six types of geometrically rational Fano threefolds of Picard number $1$ and geometric Picard number bigger than $1$. For the last type…
We construct new families of smooth Fano fourfolds with Picard rank 1, which contain cylinders, i.e., Zariski open subsets of form $Z\times A^1$, where $Z$ is a quasiprojective variety. The affine cones over such a fourfold admit effective…
We classify all 1-nodal degenerations of smooth Fano threefolds with Picard number 1 (both nonfactorial and factorial) and describe their geometry. In particular, we describe a relation between such degenerations and smooth Fano threefolds…
We prove that the Fano variety of lines of a cuspidal cyclic cubic fourfold is a symplectic variety with transversal A2-singularities and we study the properties of the nonsymplectic order three automorphism induced by the covering…
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…
We introduce one of the most beautiful algebraic varieties known, a quintic hypersurface in projective five-space, which is invariant under the action of the Weyl group of $E_6$. This variety is intricately related with many other moduli…
We complete the analysis on the birational rigidity of quasismooth Fano 3-fold deformation families appearing in the Graded Ring Database as a complete intersection. When such a deformation family $X$ has Fano index at least 2 and is…
A classical result of Bondal-Orlov states that a standard flip in birational geometry gives rise to a fully faithful functor between derived categories of coherent sheaves. We complete their embedding into a semiorthogonal decomposition by…
We study twists of the Burkhardt quartic threefold over non-algebraically closed base fields of characteristic different from 2,3,5. We show they all admit quartic models in projective four-space. We identify a Galois-cohomological…
We study Fano threefolds that can be obtained by blowing up the three-dimensional projective space along a smooth curve of degree six and genus three. We produce many new K-stable examples of such threefolds, and we describe all finite…
The existence is proved of two new families of locally Cohen-Macaulay sextic threefolds in $\mathbb{P}^5$, which are not quadratically normal. These threefolds arise naturally in the realm of first order congruences of lines as focal loci…