Grothendieck ring of varieties, D- and L-equivalence, and families of quadrics (Q1783981)

In the paper under review the authors study different equivalent relations in the category of smooth projective varieties over a field \(\mathbb{k}\). Firstly, two varieties \(X\) and \(Y\) are said \(D\)-equivalent when their bounded derived categories of coherent sheaves \(D(X)\) and \(D(Y)\) are isomorphic. Naively one could expect that \(D\)-equivalent projective varieties have the same class in the Grothendieck ring \(K_0(\mathrm{Var}/\mathbb{k})\). As examples 1.4 and 1.5 show, this is not the case. Prompted by this fact, the authors define a weaker relation in \(K_0(\mathrm{Var}/\mathbb{k})\): they define two projective varieties \(X\) and \(Y\) to be \(L\)-equivalent whenever \[ ([X]-[Y]).\mathbb{L}^r=0 \] in \(K_0(\mathrm{Var}/ \mathbb{k})\) for \(r\geq 0\) and where \(\mathbb{L}=[\mathbb{P}^1]-[\mathrm{Spec}(\mathbb{k})]\) is the class of the affine line. Then the authors conjectured that for simply connected smooth projective varieties \(D\)-equivalence implies \(L\)-equivalence (Conjecture 1.6). It is important to point out that the assumption of simple connectedness is necessary as it is showed by examples of \(D\)-equivalent complex abelian varieties constructed by A. Efimov and K. Ueda that are not \(L\)-equivalent. One of the main results of this paper is Theorem 1.9, where a new example of \(L\)-equivalence between \(D\)-equivalent varieties is discussed: let \(X\) be a \(K3\) surface given as the complete intersection of three quadrics in \(\mathbb{P}^5\) over a field \(\mathbb{k}\) of characteristict \(\neq 2\) and let us assume that the corresponding double cover \(Y\rightarrow \mathbb{P}^2\) is smooth and the corresponding Brauer class \(\alpha_Y\in Br(Y)\) of \(Y\) is zero. The authors show that if \(X\) has a \(\mathbb{k}\)-point not on a line contained in \(X\) then \(X\) and \(Y\) are D-equivalent and \[ ([X]-[Y]).\mathbb{L}=0 \] whereas the \(L\)-equivalence is in general non-trivial (i.e., \([X]\neq[Y]\) in \(K_0(\mathrm{Var}/\mathbb{k})\)).