Counting rational points on quartic del Pezzo surfaces with a rational conic (Q2419948)

The celebrated conjectures of Batyrev and Manin about the distribution of rational points on algebraic varieties have been verified in a surprisingly small number of cases. It is surprising -- and a testament to the subtlety of the conjectures! -- that the case of quartic del Pezzo surfaces was still unresolved in 2019 when the paper under review appeared. The main theorem of this paper gives upper and lower bounds of the expected order of magnitude (vis-a-vis the conjecture) for the counting function of a del Pezzo surface \(X\) of degree four, provided that \(X\) contains a conic curve that is defined over \(\mathbb{Q}\). Specifically, if \(X\) has Picard rank \(\rho\) over \(\mathbb{Q}\), the number of rational points on \(X\) of height at most \(B\) is determined to be between \(c_1B(\log B)^{\rho-1}\) and \(c_2B(\log B)^{\rho-1}\) for some positive constants \(c_1\) and \(c_2\) (provided that \(V(\mathbb{Q})\) is nonempty). Note that there are examples of such \(X\) that are not birational to the projective plane over \(\mathbb{Q}\), which removes the most common methods of proof of such results.