\(K3\) double structures on Enriques surfaces and their smoothings (Q2475100)

In the paper under review the authors study the relation between double covers and double structures, more precisely given a smooth Enriques surface \(Y\) a \(K3\) carpet is a double structure on \(Y\) with the same invariants as a smooth \(K3\) surface. These are related to the étale \(K3\) double cover \(\pi: X\longrightarrow Y\)associated with the canonical bundle of \(Y\). The authors prove that any projective \(K3\) carpet on \(Y\) arises from a family \(\mathcal{H}\longrightarrow \mathbb{P}^N_{T^*}\) of projective embeddings of \(K3\) surfaces that degenerates to \(\pi\). As a consequence they show that any projective \(K3\) carpet on \(Y\) can be \textit{smoothed}, i.e. obtained as the flat limit of a family of smooth, irreducible projective \(K3\) surfaces. As noticed by the authors \(K3\) carpets on Enriques surfaces do not need to be projective, hence in the first part of the paper they study the existence of projective \(K3\) carpets, in particular they compute the size of the space of projective \(K3\) carpets supported on a given Enriques surface \(Y\) and show that situation resemble that of smooth \(K3\) surfaces. Then they study smoothings of carpets and the Hilbert points of projective \(K3\) carpets. They prove that the latter are always smooth, unlike the case of carpets on rational normal scrolls [which are studied by \textit{F. J. Gallego} and \textit{B. P. Purnaprajna}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 349, 2477--2492 (1997; Zbl 0872.14032)].