On degenerations of plane Cremona transformations (Q907927)

The group \(\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)\) is the group of birational selfmaps of \(\mathbb{P}^2\). It carries a natural topology with the following property. If \(A\) is a variety and \(f: \mathbb{P}^2\times A\dasharrow \mathbb{P}^2\times A\) is a family of birational maps, then the function \(A\rightarrow\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)\) defined by \(a\mapsto f(\cdot,a)\) is continuous. The group \(\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)\) carries a filtration \(\{\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d}\}_d\) where \(\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d}\) is the set of maps of degree \(d\). The paper under review describes the closure of \(\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d}\), that is, it describes degenerations of maps of degree \(d\). The main result states that \(\overline{\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d}}=\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{\leq d}\) just for small values of \(d\) and, for \(d\) big, \(\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d}\subseteq \overline{\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb{P}^2)_{d+i}}\) for some \(i\) depending on \(d\).