On the degree of irrationality in Noether’s problem

Noether’s problem asks whether, for a given field [Formula: see text] and finite group [Formula: see text], the fixed field [Formula: see text] is a purely transcendental extension of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] acts on the [Formula: see text] by [Formula: see text]. The field [Formula: see text] is naturally the function field for a quotient variety [Formula: see text]. We study the degree of irrationality [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] for an abelian group [Formula: see text], which is defined to be the minimal degree of a dominant rational map from [Formula: see text] to projective space. In particular, we give bounds for [Formula: see text] in terms of the arithmetic of cyclotomic extensions [Formula: see text].

The -cyclic McKay correspondence via motivic integration

We study the McKay correspondence for representations of the cyclic group of order $p$ in characteristic $p$. The main tool is the motivic integration generalized to quotient stacks associated to representations. Our version of the change of variables formula leads to an explicit computation of the stringy invariant of the quotient variety. A consequence is that a crepant resolution of the quotient variety (if any) has topological Euler characteristic $p$ as in the tame case. Also, we link a crepant resolution with a count of Artin–Schreier extensions of the power series field with respect to weights determined by ramification jumps and the representation.

Quotient complete intersections of affine spaces by finite linear groups

Let G be a finite subgroup of GLn(C) acting naturally on an affine space Cn of dimension n over the complex number field C and denote by Cn/G the quotient variety of Cn under this action of G. The purpose of this paper is to determine G completely such that Cn/G is a complete intersection (abbrev. CI.) i.e. its coordinate ring is a C.I. when n > 10. Our main result is (5.1). Since the subgroup N generated by all pseudo-reflections in G is a normal subgroup of G and Cn/G is obtained as the quotient variety of without loss of generality, we may assume that G is a subgroup of SLn(C) (cf. [6, 16, 24, 25]).