Stable rationality of quadric and cubic surface bundle fourfolds

We study the stable rationality problem for quadric and cubic surface bundles over surfaces from the point of view of the degeneration method for the Chow group of 0-cycles. Our main result is that a very general hypersurface X of bidegree (2,3) in P^2 x P^3 is not stably rational. Via projections onto the two factors, X is a cubic surface bundle over P^2 and a conic bundle over P^3, and we analyze the stable rationality problem from both these points of view. This provides another example of a smooth family of rationally connected fourfolds with rational and nonrational fibers. Finally, we introduce new quadric surface bundle fourfolds over P^2 with discriminant curve of any even degree at least 8, having nontrivial unramified Brauer group and admitting a universally CH_0-trivial resolution.Comment: 27 pages, comments welcome

Gaps in Basic Workers’ Rights: Measuring International Adherence to and Implementation of the Organization’s Values With Public ILO Data

Conceptualizes and measures numerically the gap between the real and the ideal world of basic workers’ rights with the help of the ratification, reporting, supervisory and complaints data at the disposal of the ILO

Stable rationality of quadric and cubic surface bundle fourfolds

We study the stable rationality problem for quadric and cubic surface bundles over surfaces from the point of view of the degeneration method for the Chow group of 0-cycles. Our main result is that a very general hypersurface X of bidegree (2,3) in P^2 x P^3 is not stably rational. Via projections onto the two factors, X is a cubic surface bundle over P^2 and a conic bundle over P^3, and we analyze the stable rationality problem from both these points of view. This provides another example of a smooth family of rationally connected fourfolds with rational and nonrational fibers. Finally, we introduce new quadric surface bundle fourfolds over P^2 with discriminant curve of any even degree at least 8, having nontrivial unramified Brauer group and admitting a universally CH_0-trivial resolution.Comment: 27 pages, comments welcome

On stable rationality of some conic bundles and moduli spaces of Prym curves

We prove that a very general hypersurface of bidegree (2, n) in P^2 x P^2 for n bigger than or equal to 2 is not stably rational, using Voisin's method of integral Chow-theoretic decompositions of the diagonal and their preservation under mild degenerations. At the same time, we also analyse possible ways to degenerate Prym curves, and the way how various loci inside the moduli space of stable Prym curves are nested. No deformation theory of stacks or sheaves of Azumaya algebras like in recent work of Hasset-Kresch-Tschinkel is used, rather we employ a more elementary and explicit approach via Koszul complexes, which is enough to treat this special case.Comment: 23 pages; Macaulay 2 code used for verification of parts of the paper available at http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/bothmer/m2.html and at the end of the TeX file; v2: in section 4, we now included a proof of the main theorem that works for all n (unconditional on the parity) that was communicated to us by Zhi Jiang, Zhiyu Tian, and Letao Zhang. Several other minor expository improvement