Cremona equivalence and log Kodaira dimension

Abstract

Two projective varieties are said to be Cremona equivalent if there is a Cremona modification sending one onto the other. In the last decade, Cremona equivalence has been investigated widely, and we now have a complete theory for non-divisorial reduced schemes. The case of irreducible divisors is completely different, and not much is known besides the case of plane curves and a few classes of surfaces. In particular, for plane curves it is a classical result that an irreducible plane curve is Cremona equivalent to a line if and only if its log-Kodaira dimension is negative. This can be interpreted as the log version of Castelnuovo's rationality criterion for surfaces. One expects that a similar result for surfaces in projective space should not be true, as it is false, the generalization in higher dimensions of Castelnuovo's Rationality Theorem. In this paper, the first example of such behavior is provided, exhibiting a rational surface in the projective space with negative log-Kodaira dimension, which is not Cremona equivalent to a plane. This can be thought of as a sort of log Iskovkikh-Manin, Clemens-Griffith, Artin-Mumford example. Using this example, it is then possible to show that Cremona equivalence to a plane is neither open nor closed among log pairs with negative Kodaira dimension.