Smooth quartic surfaces with 352 conics (Q1344922)

Over the years there has been much work done on hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb{P}^3\) with many nodes, as well as with many lines. -- A smooth quartic should only contain a finite number of rational curves for each degree \(d\). For \(d = 1\) the bound is known to be 64 but for \(d > 1\) there are no known explicit bounds. In the present note the authors show the existence of a smooth quartic with many conics (352). In fact they prove that a certain Kummer surface associated to an abelian surface with (1,9) polarization can be smoothly embedded, and they are able to pinpoint exactly those curves in its lattice that map to conics. In passing they determine the incidence relations, based on translations by half-periods, in particularly emphasizing that there are exactly sixteen mutually disjoint conics (corresponding of course to the fixed points of the Kummer involution). The authors regret that they have so far been unable to exhibit explicit equations for the quartics. They also point out that the constructions can be generalised to produce also for \(d > 2\) quartics with 16 mutually disjoint rational curves of degree \(d\). The problem is however to prove the existence of smooth embeddings into \(\mathbb{P}^3\).