The aim of this paper is to study all the natural first steps of the minimal model program for the moduli space of stable pointed curves. We prove that they admit a modular interpretation, and we study their geometric properties. As a particular case, we recover the first few Hassett–Keel log canonical models. As a by-product, we produce many birational morphisms from the moduli space of stable pointed curves to alternative modular projective compactifications of the moduli space of pointed curves.

In this article, we describe the embeddings of the Heisenberg group into the Cremona group.

We establish the minimal model theory for $\mathbb{Q}$ -factorial log surfaces and log canonical surfaces in Fujiki’s class ${\mathcal{C}}$ .

An effective lower bound on the entropy of some explicit quadratic plane Cremona transformations is given. The motivation is that such transformations (Hénon maps, or Feistel ciphers) are used in symmetric key cryptography. Moreover, a hyperbolic plane Cremona transformation g is rigid, in the sense of [5], and under further explicit conditions some power of g is tight.

Let X be a normal compact Kähler space with klt singularities and torsion canonical bundle. We show that X admits arbitrarily small deformations that are projective varieties if its locally trivial deformation space is smooth. We then prove that this unobstructedness assumption holds in at least three cases: if X has toroidal singularities, if X has finite quotient singularities and if the cohomology group ${\mathrm {H}^{2} \!\left ( X, {\mathscr {T}_{X}} \right )}$ vanishes.

We prove that the number of MMP-series of a smooth projective threefold of positive Kodaira dimension and of Picard number equal to three is at most two.

A strong submeasure on a compact metric space X is a sub-linear and bounded operator on the space of continuous functions on X. A strong submeasure is positive if it is non-decreasing. By the Hahn–Banach theorem, a positive strong submeasure is the supremum of a non-empty collection of measures whose masses are uniformly bounded from above. There are many natural examples of continuous maps of the form $f:U\rightarrow X$, where X is a compact metric space and $U\subset X$ is an open-dense subset, where f cannot extend to a reasonable function on X. We can mention cases such as transcendental maps of $\mathbb {C}$, meromorphic maps on compact complex varieties, or continuous self-maps $f:U\rightarrow U$ of a dense open subset $U\subset X$ where X is a compact metric space. For the aforementioned mentioned the use of measures is not sufficient to establish the basic properties of ergodic theory, such as the existence of invariant measures or a reasonable definition of measure-theoretic entropy and topological entropy. In this paper we show that strong submeasures can be used to completely resolve the issue and establish these basic properties. In another paper we apply strong submeasures to the intersection of positive closed $(1,1)$ currents on compact Kähler manifolds.

We compactify and regularise the space of initial values of a planar map with a quartic invariant and use this construction to prove its integrability in the sense of algebraic entropy. The system has certain unusual properties, including a sequence of points of indeterminacy in $\mathbb {P}^{1}\!\times \mathbb {P}^{1}$ . These indeterminacy points lie on a singular fibre of the mapping to a corresponding QRT system and provide the existence of a one-parameter family of special solutions.

Let k be a field, $x_1, \dots , x_n$ be independent variables and let $L_n = k(x_1, \dots , x_n)$ . The symmetric group $\operatorname {\Sigma }_n$ acts on $L_n$ by permuting the variables, and the projective linear group $\operatorname {PGL}_2$ acts by

$$ \begin{align*} \begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c & d \end{pmatrix}\, \colon x_i \longmapsto \frac{a x_i + b}{c x_i + d} \end{align*} $$

$i = 1, \dots , n$

$L_n^{\operatorname {PGL}_2}$

$S \subset \operatorname {\Sigma }_n$

$L_n^S$

$K_n^S$

$n \geqslant 5,$

$L_n^S$

$K_n^S$

$\{ 1, \dots , n \}$

$n \leqslant 4$

The following theorem, which includes as very special cases results of Jouanolou and Hrushovski on algebraic $D$ -varieties on the one hand, and of Cantat on rational dynamics on the other, is established: Working over a field of characteristic zero, suppose $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{1},\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{2}:Z\rightarrow X$ are dominant rational maps from an (possibly nonreduced) irreducible scheme $Z$ of finite type to an algebraic variety $X$ , with the property that there are infinitely many hypersurfaces on  $X$ whose scheme-theoretic inverse images under $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{1}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{2}$ agree. Then there is a nonconstant rational function $g$ on $X$ such that $g\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{1}=g\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{2}$ . In the case where $Z$ is also reduced, the scheme-theoretic inverse image can be replaced by the proper transform. A partial result is obtained in positive characteristic. Applications include an extension of the Jouanolou–Hrushovski theorem to generalised algebraic ${\mathcal{D}}$ -varieties and of Cantat’s theorem to self-correspondences.

We compute the nef cone of the Hilbert scheme of points on a general rational elliptic surface. As a consequence of our computation, we show that the Morrison–Kawamata cone conjecture holds for these nef cones.

We establish two results on three-dimensional del Pezzo fibrations in positive characteristic. First, we give an explicit bound for torsion index of relatively torsion line bundles. Second, we show the existence of purely inseparable sections with explicit bounded degree. To prove these results, we study log del Pezzo surfaces defined over imperfect fields.

For infinitely many d, Hassett showed that special cubic fourfolds of discriminant d are related to polarised K3 surfaces of degree d via their Hodge structures. For half of the d, each associated K3 surface (S, L) canonically yields another one, (Sτ, Lτ). We prove that Sτ is isomorphic to the moduli space of stable coherent sheaves on S with Mukai vector (3, L, d/6). We also explain for which d the Hilbert schemes Hilbn (S) and Hilbn (Sτ) are birational.

We prove the deformation invariance of Kodaira dimension and of certain plurigenera and the existence of canonical models for log surfaces which are smooth over an integral Noetherian scheme $S$ .

In this paper, we establish a vanishing theorem of Nadel type for the Witt multiplier ideals on threefolds over perfect fields of characteristic larger than five. As an application, if a projective normal threefold over $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ is not klt and its canonical divisor is anti-ample, then the number of the rational points on the klt-locus is divisible by $q$ .

Let k be an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic. For any integer $m\ge 2$ , we show that the Hodge numbers of a smooth projective k-variety can take on any combination of values modulo m, subject only to Serre duality. In particular, there are no non-trivial polynomial relations between the Hodge numbers.

In this paper, we prove that if a compact Kähler manifold X has a smooth Hermitian metric $\omega $ such that $(T_X,\omega )$ is uniformly RC-positive, then X is projective and rationally connected. Conversely, we show that, if a projective manifold X is rationally connected, then there exists a uniformly RC-positive complex Finsler metric on $T_X$ .

Many phenomena in geometry and analysis can be explained via the theory of $D$ -modules, but this theory explains close to nothing in the non-archimedean case, by the absence of integration by parts. Hence there is a need to look for alternatives. A central example of a notion based on the theory of $D$ -modules is the notion of holonomic distributions. We study two recent alternatives of this notion in the context of distributions on non-archimedean local fields, namely $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$ -class distributions from Cluckers et al. [‘Distributions and wave front sets in the uniform nonarchimedean setting’, Trans. Lond. Math. Soc.5(1) (2018), 97–131] and WF-holonomicity from Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)]. We answer a question from Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)] by showing that each distribution of the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$ -class is WF-holonomic and thus provides a framework of WF-holonomic distributions, which is stable under taking Fourier transforms. This is interesting because the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$ -class contains many natural distributions, in particular, the distributions studied by Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)]. We show also another stability result of this class, namely, one can regularize distributions without leaving the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$ -class. We strengthen a link from Cluckers et al. [‘Distributions and wave front sets in the uniform nonarchimedean setting’, Trans. Lond. Math. Soc.5(1) (2018), 97–131] between zero loci and smooth loci for functions and distributions of the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$ -class. A key ingredient is a new resolution result for subanalytic functions (by alterations), based on embedded resolution for analytic functions and model theory.

We show that complex Fano hypersurfaces can have arbitrarily large degrees of irrationality. More precisely, if we fix a Fano index  $e$ , then the degree of irrationality of a very general complex Fano hypersurface of index  $e$ and dimension n is bounded from below by a constant times  $\sqrt{n}$ . To our knowledge, this gives the first examples of rationally connected varieties with degrees of irrationality greater than 3. The proof follows a degeneration to characteristic $p$ argument, which Kollár used to prove nonrationality of Fano hypersurfaces. Along the way, we show that in a family of varieties, the invariant ‘the minimal degree of a dominant rational map to a ruled variety’ can only drop on special fibers. As a consequence, we show that for certain low-dimensional families of varieties, the degree of irrationality also behaves well under specialization.

In this note, using methods introduced by Hacon et al. [‘Boundedness of varieties of log general type’, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, Volume 97 (American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2018) 309–348], we study the accumulation points of volumes of varieties of log general type. First, we show that if the set of boundary coefficients Λ satisfies the descending chain condition (DCC), is closed under limits and contains 1, then the corresponding set of volumes satisfies the DCC and is closed under limits. Then, we consider the case of ε-log canonical varieties, for 0 < ε < 1. In this situation, we prove that if Λ is finite, then the corresponding set of volumes is discrete.