Dynamical degrees of birational transformations of projective surfaces

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Abstract: The dynamical degree lambda(f) of a birational transformation f measures the exponential growth rate of the degree of the formulae that define the n-th iterate of f. We study the set of all dynamical degrees of all birational transformations of projective surfaces, and the relationship between the value of lambda(f) and the structure of the conjugacy class of f. For instance, the set of all dynamical degrees of birational transformations of the complex projective plane is a closed and well ordered set of algebraic numbers.


The paper under review studies the properties of the set of dynamical degrees of a fixed projective surface. If \(X\) is a projective surface and \(f\) is a birational transformation of \(X\), its dynamical degree is defined as NEWLINE\[NEWLINE \lambda(f)=\lim_{n\to\infty}||(f^n)_*||^{1/n} NEWLINE\]NEWLINE where \(||\cdot||\) is any norm on \(\mathrm{End}(NS_{\mathbb R}(X))\). The set of all dynamical degrees \(\Lambda(X):= \{ \lambda(f)|f \text{ birational transformations of } X \}\) is called the dynamical spectrum of \(X\). By a theorem of Diller and Favre a dynamical degree different from 1 is either a Pisot or a Salem number. Those are algebraic integers whose Galois conjugates lie in the open, resp. closed, unit disk.NEWLINENEWLINEThe first part of the paper is devoted to a survey of properties of the dynamical degrees, with proofs and several examples, and to the proof ofNEWLINENEWLINETheorem A: Let \(k\) be an algebraically closed field. Let \(f\) be a birational transformation of \(X\) defined over \(k\). If \(\lambda(f)\) is a Salem number, there exists a surface \(Y\) and a birational mapping \(\varphi: Y\dashrightarrow X\) such that \(\varphi^{-1}\circ f\circ \varphi \) is an automorphism of \(Y\).NEWLINENEWLINEAs a corollary, they obtain a spectral gap property: there is no dynamical degree between 1 and the Lehmer number \(\lambda_L\), which is conjecturally the infimum of the set of Salem numbers.NEWLINENEWLINESecondly, the authors study the set \(\Lambda(X)\) for a non-rational surface \(X\) and they prove thatNEWLINENEWLINETheorem B: (1) \(\Lambda(X)\) is made of quadratic integers and Salem numbers of degree at most 6 (resp. 22, resp. 10) if \(X\) is birationally equivalent to an abelian surface (resp. a \(K3\) surface, resp. an Enriques surface); (2) \(\Lambda(X)= \{1 \}\) otherwise.NEWLINENEWLINEThe final part of the paper is about rational surfaces. In this case, the situation is more complicated and the results rely on the study of the Picard-Manin space and the hyperbolic space.NEWLINENEWLINEThe minimal degree \(\mathrm{mcdeg}(f)\) of a birational transformation \(f\) of the projective plane is the minimum of the set of degrees of all its conjugates.NEWLINENEWLINEThe main results of this part are a bound on \(\mathrm{mcdeg}(f)\) in terms of \(\lambda(f)\) and the fact that \(\Lambda(\mathbb{P}^2)\) is well ordered and it is also closed if the base field is algebraically closed.



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