Threefold extremal contractions of type (IA) (Q542653)

One of the fundamental problems of three dimensional birational geometry is the explicit classification of divisorial contractions, flips and Mori fiber spaces (conic bundles and Del Pezzo fibrations). The existence of flips was established by \textit{S. Mori} in [J. Am. Math. Soc. 1, No. 1, 117--253 (1988; Zbl 0649.14023)] and their classification by \textit{S. Mori} and \textit{J. Kollár} [J. Am. Math. Soc. 5, No. 3, 533--703 (1992; Zbl 0773.14004)]. Divisorial contractions with at most one dimensional fibers, flipping contractions and conic bundles have many similarities in the sense that locally over the base they may be viewed as a morphism \(f : (X,C) \rightarrow (Y,Q)\), where \((X,C)\) is the germ of a 3-fold \(X\) with \(\mathbb{Q}\)-factorial terminal singularities along a proper curve \(C\) such that \(-K_X\) is \(f\)-ample and \(f^{-1}(Q)_{red}=C\). Such a map is called an extremal curve germ. If \(f\) is birational then \(f\) is either a divisorial contraction or a flip and is called an extremal neighborhood. Otherwise it is a conic bundle. In all cases, \(f\) is a one parameter \(\mathbb{Q}\)-Gorenstein smoothing of the map \(f_0 : H \rightarrow T\), where \(H \in |\mathcal{O}_X|\) is the general hyperplace section of \(X\) containing \(C\) and \(T=f(H)\). This is the approach originally taken by S. Mori and J. Kollár in their classification of flips. Therefore a classification of 3-fold extremal curve germs \(f : (X,C) \rightarrow (Y,P)\) can be obtained by classifying the general members \(H \in |\mathcal{O}_X|\) containing \(C\) and their deformations. In this paper the authors study extremal curve germs \(f : (X,C) \rightarrow (Y,Q)\) in the case that \(X\) has singularities of type (IA) (according to the classification of 3-fold terminal singularities and the notation [J. Am. Math. Soc. 1, No. 1, 117--253 (1988; Zbl 0649.14023)]). In particular, let \(H \in |\mathcal{O}_X|\) be the general member. The authors distinguish cases with respect to the singularities of \(X\) when \(H\) is normal or not. Moreover, they show that in all cases \(H^{\prime}\) has rational singularities (where \(H^{\prime}\) is the normalization of \(H\)) and they classify the dual graphs \(\Delta(H^{\prime},C^{\prime})\), where \(C^{\prime}\) is the inverse image of \(C\) in the normalization of \(H\).