Oberseminar Zahlentheorie und Arithmetische Geometrie

Fr 13.11.2020

Manin's conjecture for symmetric squares of surfaces

One topic in arithmetic geometry is the study of points on a variety over one fixed number field. This talk will be about the study of points over all quadratic extension of the base field simultaneously. For the study of rational points many techniques and conjectures are available. We can also apply these to the study of quadratic points by consider the symmetric square of the variety; any quadratic point on a variety is naturally a rational point on its symmetric square.

Motivic Euler products and Bertini theorems

The Grothendieck group of varieties over a field k is the quotient of the free abelian group of isomorphism classes of varieties over k by the so-called cut-and-paste relations. It moreover has a ring structure coming from the product of varieties. Many problems in number theory have a natural, more geometric counterpart involving elements of this ring. Thus, Poonen's Bertini theorem over finite fields has a motivic analogue due to Vakil and Wood, which expresses the motivic density of smooth hypersurface sections as the degree goes to infinity in terms of a special value of Kapranov's zeta function. I will report on joint work with Sean Howe, providing a broad generalization of Vakil and Wood's result, which implies in particular a motivic analogue of Poonen's Bertini theorem with Taylor conditions, as well as motivic analogues of many generalizations and variants of Poonen's theorem. A key ingredient for this is a notion of motivic Euler product which allows us to write down candidate motivic probabilities.