The Dynkin diagrams of rational double points

We survey some results on real rational surfaces focused on their topology and their birational geometry.

It is a very old and interesting open problem to characterize those collections of embedded topological types of local plane curve singularities which may appear as singularities of a projective plane curve C of degree d. The goal of the present article is to give a complete (topological) classification of those cases when C is rational and it has a unique singularity which is locally irreducible (i.e. C is unicuspidal) with one Puiseux pair.

Given a Klein surface Y, there is a unique symmetric Riemann surface X being the complex double of Y. In this paper we shall show that the situation is not the same when we work in the category of surfaces with nodes.

We classify singular fibres over general points of the discriminant locus of projective complex Lagrangian fibrations on 4-dimensional holomorphic symplectic manifolds. The singular fibre F is the following either one: F is isomorphic to the product of an elliptic curve and a Kodaira singular fibre up to finite unramified covering or F is a normal crossing variety consisting of several copies of a minimal elliptic ruled surface of which the dual graph is Dynkin diagram of typ...

We introduce a new technique that is used to show that the complex projective plane blown up at 6, 7, or 8 points has infinitely many distinct smooth structures. None of these smooth structures admit smoothly embedded spheres with self-intersection -1, i.e. they are minimal. In addition, none these smooth structures admit an underlying symplectic structure. Shortly after the appearance of a preliminary version of this article, Park, Stipsicz, and Szabo used the techniques des...

The aim of this note is to give a quick algebraic proof of (the combinatorial part of) the classification theorem for compact real surfaces, whose classical proofs (as in the Massey book and in the Conway ZIP proof) are based on surgery (and pictures) and look more intricate.

This paper describes how to compute equations of plane models of minimal Du Val double planes of general type with $p_g=q=1$ and $K^2=2,...,8.$ A double plane with $K^2=8$ having bicanonical map not composed with the associated involution is also constructed. The computations are done using the algebra system Magma.

The purpose of this article is to study the deformations of smooth surfaces $X$ of general type whose canonical map is a finite, degree 2 morphism onto a minimal rational surface or onto $\mathbf F_1$, embedded in projective space by a very ample complete linear series. Among other things, we prove that any deformation of the canonical morphism of such surfaces $X$ is again a morphism of degree 2. A priori, this is not at all obvious, for the invariants $(p_g(X),c_1^2(X))$ of...

This paper deals with the Nash problem, which consists in proving that the number of families of arcs on a singular germ of a surface $S$ coincides with the number of irreducible components of the exceptional divisor in the minimal resolution of this singularity. We propose a program for an affirmative solution of the Nash problem in the case of normal 2-dimensional hypersurface singularities. We illustrate this program by giving an affirmative solution of the Nash problem fo...

The families of smooth rational surfaces in $\PP^4$ have been classified in degree $\le 10$. All known rational surfaces in $\PP^4$ can be represented as blow-ups of the plane $\PP^2$. The fine classification of these surfaces consists of giving explicit open and closed conditions which determine the configurations of points corresponding to all surfaces in a given family. Using a restriction argument originally due independently to Alexander and Bauer we achieve the fine cla...