Hilbert schemes of lines and conics and automorphism groups of Fano threefolds (Q1744823)

The paper under review is a thorough survey on Hilbert schemes of lines and conics of Fano threefolds of Picard number one, and on the automorphism groups of such manifolds. A Fano threefold \(X\) is a smooth variety \(X\) whose anticanonical bundle \(-K_X\) is ample; important invariants of of Fano threefolds are the index \(i_X\), which is the maximum integer such that \(-K_X \sim i_X H\) in the Picard group of \(X\), the degree \(d(X)=H^3\) and the genus, defined as \(g(X)=-\frac{1}{2}K_X^3 +1\), which is an integer greater than or equal to \(2\). The authors study the Hilbert schemes of lines on del Pezzo threefolds (that is, Fano threefolds of index two) of degree \(d(X) \geq 3\) and the Hilbert scheme of conics on Fano threefolds of index one and genus \(g(X) \geq 7\). In both cases \(H\) is very ample, so lines and conics are lines and conics with respect to the embedding defined by \(|H|\). Many of the results described in Theorem 1.1.1 where already known, but scattered in the literature over a long timespan; in the reviewer's opinion it is a commendable effort, which can be very useful for people working in the field, to have them collected and proved all together. Moreover the proof presented in the paper for the even genus cases emphasizes a correspondence between Fano threefolds of index one and two, which arises at the level of derived categories and has been previously noted by \textit{A. G. Kuznetsov} [Proc. Steklov Inst. Math. 264, 110--122 (2009; Zbl 1312.14055); translation from Tr. Mat. Inst. Steklova 264, 116--128 (2009)]. The description of the Hilbert schemes is then used to obtain results on the automorphism groups of the variety, since the induced action on the Hilbert schemes is proved to be faithful in all the cases described in Theorem 1.1.1. In particular the authors prove (Theorem 1.1.2) that the automorphism group of a Fano threefold is finite, except for a (short) list of varieties for which the group is explicitly described.