On minimal log discrepancies on varieties with fixed Gorenstein index (Q274139): Difference between revisions

Minimal log discrepancies (mlds) were introduced by Shokurov in his study of the problem of termination of flips. He made two conjectures about mlds, the ACC (ascending chain condition) and the LSC (lower semicontinuity) conjecture, which together imply termination of flips. The paper under review is concerned with the ACC conjecture, which states that the set of all numbers of the form \(\mathrm{mld}_x (X, \Delta)\) satisfies the ascending chain condition, where \((X, \Delta)\) is a log pair of fixed (or bounded above) dimension, \(\Delta\) is an \(\mathbb R\)-divisor with coefficients from a fixed set satisfying the descending chain condition, and \(x \in X\) is a closed point. \textit{M. Kawakita} [J. Algebr. Geom. 23, No. 4, 765--774 (2014; Zbl 1343.14014), Theorem. 1.2] proved a special case of the ACC conjecture, namely that the set of all numbers of the form \(\mathrm{mld}_x (X, \Delta, \mathfrak a)\) is finite, where \((X, \Delta)\) is a fixed pair and \(\mathfrak a\) is a formal product of ideal sheaves with exponents in a fixed finite set. Actually, he proved a more general result [loc. cit., Theorem. 1.1], the following generalization of which is the main result of the paper under review: Theorem 1.2: The set of all log discrepancies \(a_E(X, \mathfrak a)\) is discrete, where \((X, \mathfrak a)\) is a log canonical pair of fixed (or bounded above) dimension and Gorenstein index, \(\mathfrak a\) has exponents in a fixed finite set, and \(E\) is a divisor over \(X\). As an immediate corollary, the author deduces that the set of all \(\mathrm{mld}_x (X, \mathfrak a)\) is discrete, where \(X\) and \(\mathfrak a\) are as in Theorem 1.2 (the latter set is contained in the former). He is unable to show unconditionally that this set is finite, which however he expects to hold. A further corollary is the following: The set of all \(\mathrm{mld}_x (X, \Delta)\) satisfies the ACC, where \((X, \Delta)\) is a three-dimensional canonical pair and \(\Delta\) has coefficients in a fixed finite subset of \([0, 1]\). Furthermore, \(1\) is the only accumulation point of this set.