Rationality in families of threefolds (Q1945111)

A well-known open question is whether the condition of being rational is open or closed (although the general expectation is that it is neither open or closed). The paper under review proves that the locus of rational varieties in a projective family of relative dimension three over an algebraically closed field is a countable union of closed subsets of the locus of separably rationally connected varieties. In particular, in characteristic \(0\) the locus of rational varieties is a countable union of closed subsets.