The Chow group of the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces (Q2505610)

\textit{I. Naruki} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 45, 1--30 (1982; Zbl 0508.14005)] constructed a desingularisation \({\mathcal C}\) of the moduli space \({\mathcal M}\) of marked cubic surfaces. The variety \({\mathcal C}\) is referred to as the cross-ratio variety because it can be described in terms of certain cross-ratios studied by Cayley, but the description of it given by Naruki is as a particular birational modification of the toric variety associated with the Weyl chamber decomposition of the root system \(D_4\). It carries an action of the Weyl group \(W(E_6)\). This paper uses that description to compute the Chow groups and Chern classes of \({\mathcal C}\). The authors use this to write down Riemann-Roch for \({\mathcal C}\) explicitly. They obtain information about the pullback (called \(nH\)) to \({\mathcal C}\) of \({\mathcal O}(n)\) of the projective embedding of \({\mathcal M}\) in \(\mathbb P^9\) discovered by Coble (who regarded \({\mathcal M}\) as parametrising sets of six points in \(\mathbb P^2\)), and rediscovered by Allcock and Freitag using modular forms. It turns out that \(\chi(nH)\) coincides with the Hilbert function of \(\mathbb{C}[Y_0,\dots,Y_9]/I\), where \(I\) is the homogeneous ideal of \({\mathcal M}\) in \(\mathbb P^9\). This suggests that Sym\(^n H^0(H)\) surjects onto \(H^0(nH)\) and \(H^i(nH)\) vanishes for \(i,n>0\). The structure of the paper is well described in the introduction: ``We determine the Chow groups of \({\mathcal C}\) and the spaces of \(W(E_6)\)-invariant cycles in section 2. In section 3 we consider the exceptional divisors in \({\mathcal C}\) over the cusps in \({\mathcal M}\) , which we call cusp divisors (these are actually very simple varieties, being the product of three \(\mathbb P^1\)s. We study the 36 boundary divisors, which parametrize nodal cubic surfaces, in section 4. The image of such a divisor in \({\mathcal M}\) is isomorphic to the Segre cubic in \(\mathbb P^4\). We use the information obtained on these divisors to compute the Chern classes of \({\mathcal C}\) in section 5. In section 6.3 we consider the 45 tritangent divisors, these parametrize cubics with an Eckardt point (a point on the cubic surface through which 3 lines pass). All these divisors correspond, in a \(W(E_6)\)-equivariant way, to points in a finite projective geometry.''