Rigid affine surfaces with isomorphic A2-cylinders

We construct families of smooth affine surfaces with pairwise non isomorphic A 1-cylinders but whose A 2-cylinders are all isomorphic. These arise as complements of cuspidal hyperplane sections of smooth projective cubic surfaces

Affine open subsets in A^3 without the cancellation property

We give families of examples of principal open subsets of the affine space \mathbb{A}^{3} which do not have the cancellation property. We show as a by-product that the cylinders over Koras-Russell threefolds of the first kind have a trivial Makar-Limanov invariant

Complements of hyperplane sub-bundles in projective space bundles over the projective line

We establish that the isomorphy type as an abstract algebraic variety of the complement of an ample hyperplane sub-bundle H of a projective space bundle of rank r-1 over the projective line depends only on the the r-fold self-intersection of H . In particular it depends neither on the ambient bundle nor on a particular ample hyperplane sub-bundle with given r-fold self-intersection. Our proof exploits the unexpected property that every such complement comes equipped with the structure of a non trivial torsor under a vector bundle on the affine line with a double origin

Log-uniruled affine varieties without cylinder-like open subsets

A classical result of Miyanishi-Sugie and Keel-McKernan asserts that for smooth affine surfaces, affine-uniruledness is equivalent to affine-ruledness, both properties being in fact equivalent to the negativity of the logarithmic Kodaira dimension. Here we show in contrast that starting from dimension three, there exists smooth affine varieties which are affine-uniruled but not affine-ruled

Real frontiers of fake planes

In [8], we define and partially classify fake real planes, that is, minimal complex surfaces with conjugation whose real locus is diffeomorphic to the euclidean real plane $\mathbb{R}^{2}$. Classification results are given up to biregular isomorphisms and up to birational diffeomorphisms. In this note, we describe in an elementary way numerous examples of fake real planes and we exhibit examples of such planes of every Kodaira dimension $\kappa\in \{-\infty,0,1,2\}$ which are birationally diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^{2}$