On the Unirationality of del Pezzo surfaces of degree two

Cecília Salgado, Damiano Testa, Anthony Várilly-Alvarado

Published 2013-04-25Version 1

Among geometrically rational surfaces, del Pezzo surfaces of degree two over a field k containing at least one point are arguably the simplest that are not known to be unirational over k. Looking for k-rational curves on these surfaces, we extend some earlier work of Manin on this subject. We then focus on the case where k is a finite field, where we show that all except possibly three explicit del Pezzo surfaces of degree two are unirational over k.