Automorphisms of smooth canonically polarized surfaces in positive characteristic (Q520363): Difference between revisions

The paper deals with smooth canonically polarized surfaces \(X\) defined over an algebraically closed field \(k\) in positive characteristic \(p\) with non-smooth automorphism scheme \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\). An important motivation for the study comes from moduli theory, since the smoothness of the automorphism scheme provides a necessary condition for the moduli stack of canonically polarized surfaces to be Deligne-Mumford. The main result is the following: Theorem 1.1. Let \(X\) be a smooth canonically polarized surface defined over an algebraically closed field \(k\) of characteristic \(p>0\) with \(1 \leq K_X^2 \leq 2\) and non-smooth automorphism scheme. If \(K_X^2=2\) and \(p \neq 3,5\), then \(X\) is uniruled. If in addition \(\chi(\mathcal O_X) \geq 2\), then \(X\) is unirational and \(\pi_1^{et}(X)=\{ 1 \}\). If \(K_X^2=1\) and \(p \neq 7\), then \(X\) is unirational and \(\pi_1^{et}(X)=\{ 1 \}\), except possibly if \(p \in\{ 3,5 \}\) and \(X\) is a simply connected supersingular Godeaux surface. If in addition \(p \neq 3,5\), then \(p_g(X) \leq 1\). In all cases, \(X\) is the quotient of a ruled surface by a rational vector field. In addition to the main result, the author also derives conditions on certain invariants of a canonically polarized surface \(X\) and the characteristic \(p\) of the field \(k\) implying the smoothness of \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\).