Affine surfaces fibered by affine lines over the projective line (Q1392972)

This paper gives a classification of affine surfaces which are \(\mathbb{A}^1\)-bundles over the projective line \(\mathbb{P}^1\). Such surfaces are characterized as certain open subvarieties of the classical Nagata-Hirzebruch (complete) rational surfaces. They are also described in terms of patching data, which yields a determination of their rings of algebraic functions. The motivation stems from S. Pinchuk's recent counter-example to the ``real Jacobian conjecture'' and, more directly, from R. Peretz's follow-up work showing that the two polynomials which define Pinchuk's example lie inside one of a special type of subrings of \(\mathbb{R} [X,Y]\) which arise in the study of asymptotic values. It turns out that such rings are affine coordinate rings for certain of the above-mentioned \(\mathbb{A}^1\)-bundles. Peretz proved that no similar example could be a counter-example to the classical Jacobian conjecture. In this paper we show that the 2-dimensional Jacobian conjecture is equivalent to the non-existence of a map of complex varieties \(\varphi:V \to\mathbb{A}^2\) where \(V\) is an affine variety containing \(\mathbb{A}^2\) as an open subvariety, \(\varphi\) restricted to \(\mathbb{A}^2\) has constant non-zero Jacobian determinant, \(V-\mathbb{A}^2\) is a (possibly singular) rational curve whose normalization is \(\mathbb{A}^1\), and \(V\) admits a map to \(\mathbb{P}^1\) making it an \(\mathbb{A}^1\)-bundle except over one point of \(\mathbb{P}^1\) whose fiber is \(V-\mathbb{A}^2\), set-theoretically. Furthermore we show that any map in Peretz's class extends to a map \(V\to \mathbb{A}^2\) as above where \(V\) is an actual \(\mathbb{A}^1\)-bundle over \(\mathbb{P}^1\). (In the case of Pinchuk's example, \(V\) is the complement of the diagonal in \(\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1\).) We give a class of polynomial maps strictly larger than the one given by Peretz in which there could be no counter-example to the Jacobian conjecture.