Related papers: Restrictions on rational surfaces lying in very ge…

We determine the rationality of very general quasismooth Fano 3-fold weighted hypersurfaces completely and determine the stable rationality of them except for cubic 3-folds. More precisely we prove that (i) very general Fano 3-fold weighted…

We give an upper bound for the degree of rational curves in a family that covers a given birational ruled surface in projective space. The upper bound is stated in terms of the degree, sectional genus and arithmetic genus of the surface. We…

We find new lower bounds on the torsion orders of very general Fano hypersurfaces over (uncountable) fields of arbitrary characteristic. Our results imply that unirational parametrizations of most Fano hypersurfaces need to have enormously…

This article describes a unirationality construction for general low degree complete intersections in projective space which is based on a variety of highly tangent lines. Applied to hypersurfaces, this implies that a general hypersurface…

Using Voisin's method we prove that a very general hypersurface of degree at least 4 in complex projective space of dimension 6, 7, 8 or 9 is not stably rational and so, in particular, not rational. We obtain the same conclusion for the…

We use the specialization homomorphism for the birational automorphism group to study finite order birational automorphisms. For a family of varieties over a DVR, we prove that a birational automorphism of order coprime to the residue…

We prove a general specialization theorem which implies stable irrationality for a wide class of quadric surface bundles over rational surfaces. As an application, we solve with the exception of two cases, the stable rationality problem for…

We show that a very general hypersurface of degree d at least 4 and dimension at most $(d+1)2^{d-4}$ over a field of characteristic different from 2 does not admit a decomposition of the diagonal; hence, it is neither stably nor retract…

Using ideas from the theory of tropical curves and degeneration, we prove that any Fano hypersurface (and more generally Fano complete intersections) is swept by at most quadratic rational curves.

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…

Let $X$ be either a general hypersurface of degree $n+1$ in $\mathbb P^n$ or a general $(2,n)$ complete intersection in $\mathbb P^{n+1}, n\geq 4$. We construct balanced rational curves on $X$ of all high enough degrees. If $n=3$ or $g=1$,…

Let $X$ be an algebraic variety, defined over the rationals. This paper gives upper bounds for the number of rational points on $X$, with height at most $B$, for the case in which $X$ is a curve or a surface. In the latter case one excludes…

In this article, we prove that there does not exist a family of entire curves in the universal family of hypersurfaces of degree $d\geq 2n$ in the complex projective space ${\mathbb P}^n$. This can be seen as a weak version of the Kobayashi…

Over fields of characteristic zero, we show that for $n=1,d\geq4$ or $n=2,d\geq5$ or $n\geq3, d\geq 2n$, the generic $m$-marked degree-$d$ hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^{n+1}$ admits the $m$ marked points as all the rational points. Over…

For $X$ a smooth cubic threefold we study the Pl\"ucker embedding of the Fano surface of lines $S$ of $X$. We prove that if $X$ is general then the minimal gonality of a covering family of curves of $S$ is four and that this happens for a…

Given a morphism between smooth projective varieties $f: W \to X$, we study whether $f$-relatively free rational curves imply the existence of $f$-relatively very free rational curves. The answer is shown to be positive when the fibers of…

Consider the scheme parametrizing non-constant morphisms from a fixed projective curve to a projective surface. There is a rational map between this scheme and the Chow variety of $1$-cycles on the surface. We prove that, if the curve is…

It is well known since Noether that the gonality of a smooth plane curve of degree d>3 is d-1. Given a k-dimensional complex projective variety X, the most natural extension of gonality is probably the degree of irrationality, that is the…

We consider the Fano scheme $F_k(X)$ of $k$--dimensional linear subspaces contained in a complete intersection $X \subset \mathbb{P}^n$ of multi--degree $\underline{d} = (d_1, \ldots, d_s)$. Our main result is an extension of a result of…

Let k be a finite field with characteristic exceeding 3. We prove that the space of rational curves of fixed degree on any smooth cubic hypersurface over k with dimension at least 11 is irreducible and of the expected dimension.