Congruences of 5-secant conics and the rationality of some admissible cubic fourfolds (Q2631561)

A smooth complex cubic fourfold is a smooth hypersurface \(X\subset \mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{C}}^5\) of degree 5. One of the most challenging open problems, at the moment that this review has been written, is the rationality of a smooth cubic fourfold. Examples of rational smooth cubic fourfolds are known and the very general cubic fourfold is expected to be irrational, even though no irrational example is known yet. A cubic fourfold is special if it contains a surface which is not homologous to a complete intersection. Special cubic fourfolds form a countably infinite union of irreducible families \(\mathcal{C}_d\), where each \(\mathcal{C}_d\) is a divisor in the moduli space \(\mathcal{C}\) of cubic fourfolds, and \(d>6\) is an even integer not divisible by 4, or 9, or by any odd number of the form \(3m+2\) [\textit{B. Hassett}, Compos. Math. 120, No. 1, 1--23 (2000; Zbl 0956.14031)]. It is conjectured that the cubic fourfolds corresponding to points of the divisors \(\mathcal{C}_d\) are precisely the rational ones. The first three admissible values for \(d\) are \(14, 26, 38\). Fano proved that a cubic fourfold corresponding to a general point of \(\mathcal{C}_{14}\) is rational. In this paper the authors show that every smooth cubic fourfold corresponding to a point of \(\mathcal{C}_{26}\) and \(\mathcal{C}_{38}\) is rational.