Related papers: Rational lines on smooth cubic surfaces

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…

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…

We give an arithmetic count of the lines on a smooth cubic surface over an arbitrary field $k$, generalizing the counts that over $\mathbb{C}$ there are $27$ lines, and over $\mathbb{R}$ the number of hyperbolic lines minus the number of…

This paper deals with surfaces with many lines. It is well-known that a cubic contains 27 of them and that the maximal number for a quartic is 64. In higher degree the question remains open. Here we study classical and new constructions of…

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…

Segre proved that a smooth cubic surface over Q is unirational iff it has a rational point. We prove that the result also holds for cubic hypersurfaces over any field, including finite fields.

We show that there cannot be more than 64 lines on a quartic surface admitting isolated rational double points over an algebraically closed field of characteristic $p \neq 2,\,3$, thus extending Segre--Rams--Sch\"utt theorem. Our proof…

We introduce certain rational functions on a smooth projective surface X in IP^3 which facilitate counting the lines on X. We apply this to smooth quintics in characteristic zero to prove that they contain no more than 127 lines, and that…

We prove a bound on the number of lines on a smooth degree-d surface in three-dimensional projective space for $d \geq 3$. This bound improves a bound due to Segre and renders some of his arguments rigorous. It is the best known bound for…

We prove that any smooth cubic surface defined over any number field satisfies the lower bound predicted by Manin's conjecture possibly after an extension of small degree.

Let k be a field of characteristic other than 2,3. We prove that there are no geometrically smooth quartic surfaces in IP^3 with more than 64 lines. As a key step, we derive the sharp bound that any line meets at most 20 other lines on a…

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…

The Cayley--Salmon theorem implies the existence of a 27-sheeted covering space specifying lines contained in smooth cubic surfaces over $\mathbb{C}$. In this paper we compute the rational cohomology of the total space of this cover, using…

It is hypothetized that the algebra of the configuration of twenty-seven lines lying on a general cubic surface underlines the dimensional hierarchy of heterotic string spacetimes.

Let Fq be a finite field with q=8 or q at least 16. Let S be a smooth cubic surface defined over Fq containing at least one rational line. We use a pigeonhole principle to prove that all the rational points on S are generated via tangent…

A classical result due to Segre states that on a real cubic surface in ${\mathbb P}^3_\R$ there exists two kinds of real lines: elliptic and hyperbolic lines. These two kinds of real lines are defined in an intrinsic way, i.e., their…

In characteristic $p>0$ and for $q$ a power of $p$, we compute the number of nonplanar rational curves of arbitrary degrees on a smooth Hermitian surface of degree $q+1$ under the assumption that the curves have a parametrization given by…

We present a collection of research questions on cubic surfaces in 3-space. These questions inspired a collection of papers to be published in a special issue of the journal Le Matematiche. This article serves as the introduction to that…

We show that smooth cubic hypersurfaces of dimension $n$ defined over a finite field ${\bf F}_q$ contain a line defined over ${\bf F}_q$ in each of the following cases: - $n=3$ and $q\ge 11$; - $n=4$ and $q\ne 3$; - $n\ge 5$. For a smooth…

Given a number field $k$ and a positive integer $d$, in this paper we consider the following question: does there exist a smooth diagonal surface of degree $d$ in $\mathbb{P}^3$ over $k$ which contains a line over every completion of $k$,…