Affine lines in the complement of a smooth plane conic (Q1749762)

Let \(S\) be the affine surface obtained as the complement of a smooth conic \(Q\) in the projective plane \(\mathbb P^2\), over a field of characteristic zero. Given a point \(p\) in \(Q\) and the tangent line \(L\) of \(Q\) at \(p\), let \(\mathcal P\) be the pencil generated by \(Q\) and \(2L\). Then \(L\) and a general member of \(\mathcal P\) yield two examples of an embedding of the affine line \(\mathbb A^1\) into \(S\). The main result of the paper is that up to the action of the automorphism group \(\mathrm{Aut}(S)\), there are exactly two classes of embedding of the affine line into \(S\), whose representatives are these two examples. The result is analogue to the famous theorem of \textit{S. S. Abhyankar} and \textit{T.-t. Moh} [J. Reine Angew. Math. 276, 148--166 (1975; Zbl 0332.14004)] about embeddings of \(\mathbb A^1\) into \(\mathbb A^2\), and the proof is inspired by a recent reworked proof of this result by \textit{K. Palka} [J. Algebra Appl. 14, No. 9, Article ID 1540012, 15 p. (2015; Zbl 1326.14073)]. An explicit description of \(\mathrm{Aut}(S)\) as an amalgamated product is also provided, as well as some counter-examples in positive characteristic.