Transcendental obstructions to weak approximation on general K3 surfaces

We construct an explicit K3 surface over the field of rational numbers that has geometric Picard rank one, and for which there is a transcendental Brauer-Manin obstruction to weak approximation. To do so, we exploit the relationship between polarized K3 surfaces endowed with particular kinds of Brauer classes and cubic fourfolds.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, Magma scripts included at the end of the source file

Big rational surfaces

We prove that the Cox ring of a smooth rational surface with big anticanonical class is finitely generated. We classify surfaces of this type that are blow-ups of the plane at distinct points lying on a (possibly reducible) cubic.Comment: Major revision; added examples of big rational surfaces that are not log del Pezz

Higher dimensional analogues of Ch\^atelet surfaces

We discuss the geometry and arithmetic of higher-dimensional analogues of Ch\^atelet surfaces; namely, we describe the structure of their Brauer and Picard groups and show that they can violate the Hasse principle. In addition, we use these varieties to give straightforward generalizations of two recent results of Poonen. Specifically, we prove that, assuming Schinzel's hypothesis, the non-m^{th} powers of a number field are diophantine. Also, given a global field k such that Char(k) = p or k contains the p^{th} roots of unity, we construct a (p+1)-fold that has no k-points and no \'etale-Brauer obstruction to the Hasse principle.Comment: LaTeX, 10 pages. Spurious extra copy of source file remove