The Cayley-Oguiso automorphism of positive entropy on a \(K3\) surface (Q1953853)

The starting point of this paper is a result by \textit{K. Oguiso} [``Free automorphisms of positive entropy on smooth Kähler surfaces'', to appear in Adv. Stud. Pure Math.] showing that there exist \(K3\) surfaces of Picard number \(\rho=2\), with prescribed Néron Severi group \(N\) and with automorphism group isomorphic to \(\mathbb{Z}\) such that any generator is a fixed point free automorphism \(g\) with positive entropy. The authors'aim is to give an explicit description of this family of \(K3\) surfaces and of the automorphism. The first section starts with recalling Oguiso's results and it also contains the description of a theoretical method to construct \(g\), although it is remarked that this algorithm is of difficult practical application. In the second section, they use a result of Beauville, that a smooth quartic \(X\) is determinantal if and only if there is a curve \(C\subset X\) of degree \(6\) and genus \(3\), to show that the \(K3\) surfaces with \(\mathrm{NS}(X)\cong N\) are exactly the determinantal quartic surfaces in \(\mathbb{P}^3\) with Picard number two. Then, in Section 3 Cailey's description (see ) of determinantal quartics is used to explicitly construct \(g\) (see also \textit{F. Schur} [Math. Ann. 18, 1--33 (1881; JFM 13.0490.01)]). The key idea is that a determinantal \(K3\) surface in \(\mathbb{P}^3\) admits three embeddings \(S_i\), each of which is again determinantal. The corresponding three matrices \(M_i\) provide natural maps between these three quartic surfaces, and a composition of these maps gives the required automorphism of \(S_0\). Finally, in Sections 4 and 5 the authors exhibit an interesting explicit example for which they also study points of period two, i.e. fixed points for \(g^2\).