Global smoothings of degenerate Del Pezzo surfaces with normal crossings (Q863358)

From the introduction: V. Kulikov and U. Persson-H. Pinkham completely classified the semi-stable degenerations of \(K3\) surfaces. Then R. Friedman proved conversely that every such semi-stable \(K3\) surface can be smoothed into a smooth \(K3\) surface, under a flat deformation with a smooth total space. Meanwhile, \textit{T. Fujita} [Osaka Math. J. 27, 229--245 (1990; Zbl 0715.14030)] completely classified the semi-stable degenerations of Del Pezzo surfaces. In this article we prove that every semi-stable Del Pezzo surface is smoothed into a smooth Del Pezzo surface, under a flat deformation with a smooth total space. Main Theorem. Let \(X\) be a \(d\)-semi-stable Del Pezzo surface. Then there exists a proper surjective morphism \(f:{\mathcal X}\to\Delta\) from a smooth 3 fold \({\mathcal X}\) to a disc \(\Delta\) such that \(-K_{{\mathcal X}}\) is \(f\)-ample, and \(f^{-1}(0)\simeq X\). In proving the existence of a smoothing \(f\) we apply Kawamata-Namikawa's sufficient condition for unobstructedness of deformations. We give a surprisingly short proof of the Main Theorem as compared to Friedman's proof of the corresponding statement for \(K3\) surfaces. The basic underlying idea of our proof is that the feasibility of smoothing a semi-stable normal crossing variety ultimately boils down to a vanishing of a twisted global logarithmic Kähler differential on each irreducible component of the given normal crossing variety.