Double cubics and double quartics (Q2491114)

The author continues his study on the (non)rationality and on the superrigidity of some special varieties. Recall that a terminal \(\mathbb Q\)-factorial Fano manifold \(X\) is called superrigid if it admits no non-biregular birational automorphisms and it can be birationally transformed neither into a fibration whose generic fibre has Kodaira dimension \(-\infty\) nor into a \(\mathbb Q\)-factorial terminal Fano variety with Picard group \(\mathbb Z\) not biregular to \(X\). Let \(V\subset \mathbb P^{n}\) be a smooth hypersurface of degree \(d\) and let \(\psi:X\to V\) be a double cover branched over a smooth divisor \(R\) cut on \(V\) by an hypersurface of degree \(2r\). In this paper the author proves that \(X\) is nonrational and superrigid if \(d+r=n \geq 8\) and \(d=3,4\). This theorem extends results of many authors [see in particular \textit{A. Pukhlikov}, Sb. Math. 191, 883--908 (2000; Zbl 1004.14009)]. The proof is based on the notion of movable log-pair (i.e. a pair \((X,B_{X})\) where \(X\) is a variety and \(B_{X}= \sum B_i\) is a formal linear combination of linear systems \(B_{i}\) on \(X\) without fixed components, \(a_{i}\in \mathbb Q_{\geq 0}\)) and the result follows from the analysis of the centers of the canonical singularities of a log-pair.