FANO HYPERSURFACES WITH ARBITRARILY LARGE DEGREES OF IRRATIONALITY

We show that complex Fano hypersurfaces can have arbitrarily large degrees of irrationality. More precisely, if we fix a Fano index $e$ , then the degree of irrationality of a very general complex Fano hypersurface of index $e$ and dimension n is bounded from below by a constant times $\sqrt{n}$ . To our knowledge, this gives the first examples of rationally connected varieties with degrees of irrationality greater than 3. The proof follows a degeneration to characteristic $p$ argument, which Kollár used to prove nonrationality of Fano hypersurfaces. Along the way, we show that in a family of varieties, the invariant ‘the minimal degree of a dominant rational map to a ruled variety’ can only drop on special fibers. As a consequence, we show that for certain low-dimensional families of varieties, the degree of irrationality also behaves well under specialization.

Weak approximation for isotrivial families

We prove weak approximation for isotrivial families of rationally connected varieties defined over the function field of a smooth projective complex curve.

A Remark on Rationally Connected Varieties and Mori Dream Spaces

In this short note, we show that a construction by Ottem provides an example of a rationally connected variety that is not birationally equivalent to a Mori dream space with terminal singularities.

Refined Motivic Dimension

We define a refined motivic dimension for an algebraic variety by modifying the definition of motivic dimension by Arapura. We apply this to check and recheck the generalized Hodge conjecture for certain varieties, such as uniruled, rationally connected varieties and a rational surface fibration.