Surfaces on the Severi line (Q267071)

The Severi inequality is a theorem claimed first by \textit{F. Severi} in [Comment. Math. Helv. 4, 268--326 (1932; Zbl 0005.17602)], stating that any minimal surface of general type \(S\) of maximal Albanese dimension, i.e., such that the image of the Albanese morphism is a surface, has canonical degree \(K^2_S\) not smaller than \(4\) times the Euler characteristic \(\chi({\mathcal O}_S)\). Severi's original proof was wrong [\textit{F. Catanese}, Lect. Notes Math. 997, 90--112 (1983; Zbl 0517.14011); \textit{M. Reid}, Lect. Notes Math. 732, 534--544 (1979; Zbl 0423.14021)] and therefore the Severi inequality became a conjecture, and remained such for almost 30 years, up to \textit{R. Pardini}'s proof in [Invent. Math. 159, No. 3, 669--672 (2005; Zbl 1082.14041)]. It is a general principle in the geography of surface of general type that, when an inequality is true, the surfaces for which the inequality is an equality should be ``simpler'', and therefore a classification of them is (obviously) interesting and (maybe) possible. So, once the Severi inequality is proved, it is natural to try to attack a classification of the surfaces on the Severi line, that is of the minimal surfaces of general type \(S\) with maximal Albanese dimension \(2\) and \(K^2_S=4\chi({\mathcal O}_S)\). Unfortunately, since the argument of Pardini's is based on a limit procedure, is not easily usable to get informations on the surfaces on the Severi line. In this paper, the authors classify these surfaces, showing that the canonical models of surfaces on the Severi line are exactly the surfaces with irregularity \(2\) arising as double covers of an abelian surface with ample branch divisor having only simple singularities. The main tools are a covering trick already used in Pardini's proof and the properties of the continuous rank ([\textit{M. A. Barja}, Duke Math. J. 164, No. 3, 541--568 (2015; Zbl 1409.14013)]). The same result has been obtained independently at the same time by \textit{X. Lu} and \textit{K. Zuo} [``On the Severi type inequalities for irregular surfaces'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1504.06569}] with a different proof. It is worth mentioning that \textit{M. Manetti} had proved in [Math. Nachr. 261--262, 105--122 (2003; Zbl 1044.14017)] the same result under the additional hypothesis that \(K_S\) ist ample. Manetti's paper, that appeared few years before Pardini's proof, contains in fact a proof of the Severi inequality under this further assumption.