Workshop on birational geometry

November 10, 2021


Daniel Loughran

Arithmetic and geometry of cyclic covers

When presented with a hypersurface in projective space, a common trick is to pass to a cyclic cover of the projective space branched along the given hypersurface. In this talk I will discuss various stack-theoretic issues which arise when trying to perform this construction in a family, and give applications to finiteness results for hypersurfaces over $Q$ with good reduction outside a given set of primes. This is joint work with Ariyan Javanpeykar and Siddharth Mathur.


Marta Pieropan

Campana points on toric varieties

We call Campana points an arithmetic notion of points on Campana's orbifolds that has been first studied by Campana and Abramovich,  and that interpolates between the notions of rational and integral points. This talk will introduce Campana points on toric varieties,  present geometric heuristic arguments in support of their conjectured distribution and the currently known asymptotic results. This is joint work with Damaris Schindler.




Stefan Schreieder

The diagonal of quartic fivefolds

We show that a very general quartic hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^6$ over a field  of characteristic different from $2$ does not admit a decomposition of the diagonal, hence is not retract rational. This generalizes a result of Nicaise--Ottem, who showed stable irrationality over fields of characteristic zero. To prove our result, we introduce a new cycle-theoretic obstruction that may be seen as an analogue of the motivic obstruction for 
rationality in characteristic zero, introduced by Nicaise--Shinder and Kontsevich--Tschinkel. This is joint work with Nebojsa Pavic.


Vadim Vologodsky

Quantizations of the category of coherent sheaves on symplectic varieties

I will explain a construction due to Roman Travkin of a canonical quantization ofthe category of coherent sheaves on symplectic varieties over the ring of integers.