Immanuel van Santen to speak on 'A Characterization of Rationality and Borel Subgroups'

On September 11, 2024 Immanuel van Santen (Universität Basel) will deliver a report on 'A Characterization of Rationality and Borel Subgroups'.

Abstract:

This is joint work with Andriy Regeta and Christian Urech. In this talk, we focus on the following two questions about the group of birational transformations, Bir(X), of an irreducible variety X:

1. If Bir(X) and Bir(P^n) are isomorphic, does this imply that X and P^n are birational?

2. What are the Borel subgroups of Bir(X)?

The first question was answered affirmatively in 2014 by Serge Cantat under the additional assumption that dim X <= n. We prove that the first question has an affirmative answer without this extra assumption (and we do not use the result of Serge Cantat).

Regarding the second question, Jean-Philippe Furter and Isac Hedén completely classified the Borel subgroups of Bir(P^n) in 2023 for the case n = 2. We prove that any Borel subgroup of Bir(X) has derived length at most twice the dimension of X, and if equality holds, then X is rational, and the Borel subgroup is conjugate to the standard Borel subgroup in Bir(P^n). Moreover, we provide examples of Borel subgroups in Bir(P^n) of derived length less than 2n for any n >= 2 (the case n = 2 was treated by Furter and Hedén). This answers affirmatively a conjecture of Vladimir Popov.

Time: September 11, 18:00

Working language: English

The event will be held online.