Related papers: Two-cover descent on plane quartics with rational …

We describe a method to show a plane quartic over a number field has no rational points. The method can be adapted to show that a curve does not have divisors of degree 1 or 2 and can be generalized to arbitrary smooth projective curves.…

Given a genus $2$ curve $C$ with a rational Weierstrass point defined over a number field, we construct a family of genus $5$ curves that realize descent by maximal unramified abelian two-covers of $C$, and describe explicit models of the…

We study real double covers of $\mathbb P^1\times\mathbb P^2$ branched over a $(2,2)$-divisor, which have the structure of a conic bundle threefold with smooth quartic discriminant curve via the second projection. In each isotopy class of…

We describe an algorithm that determines a set of unramified covers of a given hyperelliptic curve, with the property that any rational point will lift to one of the covers. In particular, if the algorithm returns an empty set, then the…

We describe an algorithm that provably computes the rational torsion subgroup of the Jacobian of a curve without relying on height bounds. Instead, the strategy is to find upper bounds for the torsion subgroup using reduction modulo primes,…

Given a curve X of the form y^p = h(x) over a number field, one can use descents to obtain explicit bounds on the Mordell-Weil rank of the Jacobian or to prove that the curve has no rational points. We show how, having performed such a…

Let $E$ be an elliptic curve over a number field $K$. Descent calculations on $E$ can be used to find upper bounds for the rank of the Mordell-Weil group, and to compute covering curves that assist in the search for generators of this…

It is a classical result that there are $12$ (irreducible) rational cubic curves through $8$ generic points in $\mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{C}}^2$, but little is known about the non-generic cases. The space of $8$-point configurations is…

We study the stable pairs theory of local curves in 3-folds with descendent insertions. The rationality of the partition function of descendent invariants is established for the full local curve geometry (equivariant with respect to the…

Principally polarized abelian surfaces with prescribed real multiplication (RM) are parametrized by certain Hilbert modular surfaces. Thus rational genus 2 curves correspond to rational points on the Hilbert modular surfaces via their…

A rational projective plane ($\mathbb{QP}^2$) is a simply connected, smooth, closed manifold $M$ such that $H^*(M;\mathbb{Q}) \cong \mathbb{Q}[\alpha]/\langle \alpha^3 \rangle$. An open problem is to classify the dimensions at which such a…

In this paper, we show the existence of a Chow--Kuenneth decomposition for the moduli stack of stable curves of genus g with r marked points, for low values of g,r. We also look at the moduli space R of double covers of genus 3 curves,…

We give a conjectural characterisation of the stable reduction of plane quartics over local fields in terms of their Cayley octads. This results in p-adic criteria that efficiently give the stable reduction type amongst the 42 possible…

Refereed version to appear in Michigan Mathematical Journal. A mistake in the last section of the previous version has been corrected. The new title exactly describes the main result obtained. Building on the geometry of cubic surfaces and…

Clemm and Trebat-Leder (2014) proved that the number of quadratic number fields with absolute discriminant bounded by $x$ over which there exist elliptic curves with good reduction everywhere and rational $j$-invariant is $\gg…

Combining $2$-descent techniques with Riemann-Roch and B\'ezout's theorems, we give an upper bound on the number of rational points of bounded height on elliptic and hyperelliptic curves over function fields of characteristic $\neq 2$. We…

Let $X$ be the product of two projective spaces and consider the general CICY threefold $Y$ in $X$ with configuration matrix $A$. We prove the finiteness part of the analogue of the Clemens' conjecture for such a CICY in low bidegrees. More…

Let X be a smooth quartic surface not containing lines, defined over a number field K. We prove that there are only finitely many bitangents to X which are defined over K. This result can be interpreted as saying that a certain surface,…

Let $p$ and $q$ be distinct primes. Consider the Shimura curve $\mathcal{X}$ associated to the indefinite quaternion algebra of discriminant $pq$ over $\mathbb{Q}$. Let $J$ be the Jacobian variety of $\mathcal{X}$, which is an abelian…

Given a number field $K$ and a finite set $S$ of places of $K$, the first main result of this paper shows that the quadratic rational maps $\phi:{\mathbb P}^1\to{\mathbb P}^1$ defined over $K$ which have good reduction at all places outside…