Bounded negativity and Harbourne constants on ruled surfaces (Q2226555)

In the paper under review, the authors study the local negativity phenomenon for transversal arrangements of curves in ruled surfaces. This topic is strictly related to the famous bounded negativity conjecture which predicts that if \(X\) is a smooth complex projective surface then there exists an integer \(b(X)\) such that for every reduced curve \(C \subset X\) one always has \(C^{2} \geq -b(X)\). In that context, Harbourne around 2010 defined special constants that allow to measure the negativity of curves in an asymptotic way. Let \(X\) be a smooth complex projective surface and denote by \(\mathcal{C} = \{C_{1}, \dots, C_{d}\}\) an arrangement of smooth irreducible curves in \(X\). We say that \(X\) is transversal if \(d\geq 2\) and the curves intersect pairwise transversally. We denote by \(\mathrm{Sing}(\mathcal{C})\) the set of all intersection points of the curves and we put \(s:=\mathrm{Sing}(\mathcal{C})\). Let \(D = \sum_{i=1}^{d}C_{i}\), then the rational number \[H(X,\mathcal{C}) = \frac{1}{s} \bigg( D^{2} - \sum_{p\in\mathrm{Sing}(\mathcal{C})} m_{p}^{2}\bigg),\] where \(m_{p}\) denotes the multiplicity of \(p\), i.e., the number of branches passing through that point, is called the Harbourne constant of \(\mathcal{C}\). Now let \(X = \mathbb{P}_{C}(E)\) be a ruled surface over a smooth complex curve \(C\) of genus \(g\geq 0\) with the invariant \(e:=e(X) = \mathrm{deg}( \bigwedge^{2}E) \geq 4\). We fix a section \(C_{0}\) of \(X\) with \(\mathcal{L}(C_{0}) = \mathbb{P}_{\mathcal{O}(E)}(1)\) and denote by \(f\) a fiber. Let \(\mathcal{C} = \{C_{1}, \dots, C_{d}\}\) be a transversal arrangement of curves in \(X\) with \(d\geq 4\) and such that \(t_{d} = 0\), where \(t_{i}\) denotes the number of \(i\)-fold points. Suppose that all the curves \(C_{i}\) in \(\mathcal{C}\) are linearly equivalent to a fixed divisor \(A\) on \(X\), where \(A\) is numerically equivalent to \(aC_{0} + bf\) for \(a,b \in \mathbb{Z}\) with \(a > 0\) and \(b \geq ae\). The main result of the paper can be formulated as follows. Main Theorem. Let \(X\) be a ruled surface with \(e\geq 4\) over a smooth curve of genus \(g\). Let \(\mathcal{C}\) be a transversal arrangement of curves such that \(a\geq 2\), or \(a=1\) and there exists a subset of four curves in \(\mathcal{C}\) such that there is no point common to all the four curves. Then we have the following bound on the Harbourne constant of \(\mathcal{C}\): \[H(X,\mathcal{C}) \geq \frac{-9}{2} - \frac{8}{s} + \frac{d}{s}\bigg( \frac{ae-2b}{2}(3a-2) - 2a(g-1)\bigg) + \frac{16g+4t_{2}+t_{4}}{2s} + \frac{9t_{3}}{8s}.\] Their proof is based on Hirzebruch's idea which uses abelian covers with the exponent \(n=2\). In particular, using this covering constructed via Namba's result, the authors show that the minimal resolution of the abelian cover with the exponent \(n=2\) branched along a transversal arrangement \(\mathcal{C}\) does not lead to a new example of a ball-quotient surface, i.e., a minimal complex smooth projective surface of general type such that the universal cover is the complex unit ball.