Automorphisms of smooth canonically polarized surfaces in positive characteristic (Q520363)

The paper deals with smooth canonically polarized surfaces \(X\) defined over an algebraically closed field \(k\) in positive characteristic \(p\) with non-smooth automorphism scheme \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\). An important motivation for the study comes from moduli theory, since the smoothness of the automorphism scheme provides a necessary condition for the moduli stack of canonically polarized surfaces to be Deligne-Mumford. The main result is the following: Theorem 1.1. Let \(X\) be a smooth canonically polarized surface defined over an algebraically closed field \(k\) of characteristic \(p>0\) with \(1 \leq K_X^2 \leq 2\) and non-smooth automorphism scheme. If \(K_X^2=2\) and \(p \neq 3,5\), then \(X\) is uniruled. If in addition \(\chi(\mathcal O_X) \geq 2\), then \(X\) is unirational and \(\pi_1^{et}(X)=\{ 1 \}\). If \(K_X^2=1\) and \(p \neq 7\), then \(X\) is unirational and \(\pi_1^{et}(X)=\{ 1 \}\), except possibly if \(p \in\{ 3,5 \}\) and \(X\) is a simply connected supersingular Godeaux surface. If in addition \(p \neq 3,5\), then \(p_g(X) \leq 1\). In all cases, \(X\) is the quotient of a ruled surface by a rational vector field. In addition to the main result, the author also derives conditions on certain invariants of a canonically polarized surface \(X\) and the characteristic \(p\) of the field \(k\) implying the smoothness of \(\mathrm{Aut}(X)\).