Affine lines in the complement of a smooth plane conic

Birational automorphisms, Cremona group and generalizations (14E07) Embeddings in algebraic geometry (14E25) Automorphisms of surfaces and higher-dimensional varieties (14J50) Affine fibrations (14R25)

Abstract: We classify closed curves isomorphic to the affine line in the complement of a smooth rational projective plane conic Q. Over a field of characteristic zero, we show that up to the action of the subgroup of the Cremona group of the plane consisting of birational endomorphisms restricting to biregular auto-morphisms outside Q, there are exactly two such lines: the restriction of a smooth conic osculating Q at a rational point and the restriction of the tangent line to Q at a rational point. In contrast, we give examples illustrating the fact that over fields of positive characteristic, there exist exotic closed embeddings of the affine line in the complement of Q. We also determine an explicit set of birational endomorphisms of the plane whose restrictions generates the automorphism group of the complement of Q over a field of arbitrary characteristic.

Review text

Let \(S\) be the affine surface obtained as the complement of a smooth conic \(Q\) in the projective plane \(\mathbb P^2\), over a field of characteristic zero. Given a point \(p\) in \(Q\) and the tangent line \(L\) of \(Q\) at \(p\), let \(\mathcal P\) be the pencil generated by \(Q\) and \(2L\). Then \(L\) and a general member of \(\mathcal P\) yield two examples of an embedding of the affine line \(\mathbb A^1\) into \(S\). The main result of the paper is that up to the action of the automorphism group \(\mathrm{Aut}(S)\), there are exactly two classes of embedding of the affine line into \(S\), whose representatives are these two examples. The result is analogue to the famous theorem of \textit{S. S. Abhyankar} and \textit{T.-t. Moh} [J. Reine Angew. Math. 276, 148--166 (1975; Zbl 0332.14004)] about embeddings of \(\mathbb A^1\) into \(\mathbb A^2\), and the proof is inspired by a recent reworked proof of this result by \textit{K. Palka} [J. Algebra Appl. 14, No. 9, Article ID 1540012, 15 p. (2015; Zbl 1326.14073)]. An explicit description of \(\mathrm{Aut}(S)\) as an amalgamated product is also provided, as well as some counter-examples in positive characteristic.

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