May 2, 2019

Specialization of (stable) rationality in families with mild singularities

Date: May 2, 2019 | 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Speaker: Johannes Nicaise, Imperial
Location: Big Seminar room Ground floor / Office Bldg West (I21.EG.101)

I will present joint work with Evgeny Shinder, where we use Denef and Loesers motivic nearby fiber and a theorem by Larsen and Lunts to prove that stable rationality specializes in families with mild singularities. I will also discuss an improvement of our results by Kontsevich and Tschinkel, who defined a birational version of the motivic nearby fiber to prove specialization of rationality.