Affine cones over smooth cubic surfaces (Q726757)

Given a \(\mathbb{Q}\)-divisor \(M\) on a smooth projective variety \(X\), an \(M\)-\textit{polar cylinder} is a Zariski open subset \(U=X\setminus\mathrm{Supp}(D)\) for some effective Weil \(\mathbb{Q}\)-divisor \(D\), \(\mathbb{Q}\)-linearly equivalent to \(M\), which is isomorphic to a product \(Z\times\mathbb{A}^{1}\) for some affine variety \(Z\). The main result of the article under review is the fact that a smooth cubic surface \(S\) in \(\mathbb{P}^{3}\) does not contain any \(-K_{S}\)-polar cylinder, where \(-K_{S}\) denotes an anticanonical divisor on \(S\). The authors establish a more general relation between the existence of anticanonically polarized cylinders on smooth del Pezzo surfaces and the log-canonical thresholds of their effective anticanonical \(\mathbb{Q}\)-divisors. The proof proceeds through a case-by-case analysis of the structure of non log-canonical pairs \((S,D)\) where \(S\) is a smooth del Pezzo surface of degree \(\leq3\) and \(D\) is an effective anticanonical \(\mathbb{Q}\)-divisor. As an application, the authors answer a problem proposed by \textit{H. Flenner} and \textit{M. Zaidenberg} [Math. 2. 244, 549--575 (2003; Zbl 1043.14008)]: the affine cone in \(\mathbb{A}^{4}\) over the Fermat cubic surface in \(\mathbb{P}^{3}\) does not admit nontrivial action of the additive group \(\mathbb{G}_{a}\).