High-pliability Fano hypersurfaces (Q6115865)

The end product of the Minimal Model Program on a smooth uniruled variety is a Mori fibre space. In general, there may be several ``essentially different'' Mori fibre spaces in a class of birational equivalence. The pliability of a Mori fibre space is the set of ``essentially different'' Mori fibre spaces birational to it. The pliability \(\mathcal P\) was introduced in the context of the study of non-rational Fano \(3\)-folds - indeed, a rational Mori fibre space necessarily has infinite pliability. Terminal \(\mathbb Q\)-factorial Fano \(3\)-folds of Picard rank \(1\) are Mori fibre spaces. These can be embedded in weighted projective spaces by graded rings method [\textit{G. Brown} et al.: Graded Ring Database. \url{http://www.grdb.co.ukGradedRingDatabase}]. There are 95 Fano \(3\)-folds that are hypersurfaces, and those that are quasi-smooth are known to have pliability reduced to a point, i.e.~\(|\mathcal P|=1\) [\textit{I. Cheltsov} and \textit{J. Park}, Birationally rigid Fano threefold hypersurfaces. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2017; Zbl 1383.14004)]. The main theorem of the paper states that this no longer holds for five of these hypersurfaces when they have suitable \(cA_n\) points. Unlike in previously studied cases [\textit{A. Corti} and \textit{M. Mella}, Am. J. Math. 126, No. 4, 739--761 (2004; Zbl 1063.14016); \textit{H. Ahmadinezhad} and \textit{A.-S. Kaloghiros}, Compos. Math. 152, No. 5, 955--983 (2016; Zbl 1388.14043)], here the elements of the pliability set are non-isomorphic hypersurfaces of the same type (with different singularities). These are produced by \(2\)-ray configurations on suitable Picard rank \(2\) codimension \(4\) Fano \(3\)-folds whose equations resemble the Segre embedding of \(\mathbb P^2 \times \mathbb P^2\) as in [\textit{G. Brown} et al., Eur. J. Math. 4, No. 1, 51--72 (2018; Zbl 1390.14120)].