A smooth tropical quartic curve has seven tropical bitangent classes. Their shapes can vary within the same combinatorial type of curve. We study deformations of these shapes and we show that the conditions determined by Cueto and Markwig for lifting them to real bitangent lines are independent of the deformations. From this we deduce a tropical proof of Plücker and Zeuthen's count of the number of real bitangents to smooth plane quartic curves.
We study lifts of tropical bitangents to the tropicalization of a given complex algebraic curve together with their lifting multiplicities. Using this characterization, we show that generically all the seven bitangents of a smooth tropical plane quartic lift in sets of four to algebraic bitangents. We do this constructively, i.e. we give solutions for the initial terms of the coefficients of the bitangent lines. This is a step towards a tropical proof that a general smooth quartic admits 28 bitangent lines. The methods are also appropriate to count real bitangents, however the conditions to de…
We study bitangents of non-smooth tropical plane quartics. Our main result is that with appropriate multiplicities, every such curve has 7 equivalence classes of bitangent lines. Moreover, the multiplicity of bitangent lines varies continuously in families of tropical plane curves.
In this article we introduce the recently developed polymake extension TropicalQuarticCurves and its associated database entry in polyDB dealing with smooth tropical quartic curves. We report on algorithms implemented to analyze tropical bitangents and their lifting conditions over real closed valued fields. The new functions and data were used by the authors to provide a tropical proof of Plücker and Zeuthen's count of real bitangents to smooth quartic curves.
We study smooth tropical plane quartic curves and show that they satisfy certain properties analogous to (but also different from) smooth plane quartics in algebraic geometry. For example, we show that every such curve admits either infinitely many or exactly 7 bitangent lines. We also prove that a smooth tropical plane quartic curve cannot be hyperelliptic.
Aronhold's classical result states that a plane quartic can be recovered by the configuration of any Aronhold systems of bitangents, i.e. special 7-tuples of bitangents such that the six points at which any subtriple of bitangents touches the quartic do not lie on the same conic in the projective plane. In 2005 Lehavi proved that a smooth plane quartic can be explicitly reconstructed from its 28 bitangents; this result improved Aronhold's method of recovering the curve. In a 2011 paper Plaumann, Sturmfels and Vinzant introduced an eight by eight symmetric matrix parametrizing the bitangents of…
In this paper, we study the embedded topology of smooth plane quartics and its bitangent lines via two-graphs and apply it to construct interesting examples for Zariski $m$-ple.
We show that the Hilbert scheme which parameterises bitangent lines to a general quartic surface is a counterexample to the infinitesimal Torelli claim and is a smooth regular surface with no rational curves and very ample canonical divisor.
In this paper, we give a Zariski triple of the arrangements for a smooth quartic and its four bitangents. A key criterion to distinguish the topology of such curves is given by a matrix related to the height pairing of rational points arising from three bitangent lines.
In a section of his 1876 treatise Theorie der Abel'schen Functionen vom Geschlecht 3 Weber proved a formula that expresses the bitangents of a non-singular plane quartic in terms of Riemann theta constants (Thetanullwerte). The present note is devoted to a modern presentation of Weber's formula. In the end a connection with the universal bitangent matrix is also displayed.
In this work we compute the Dixmier invariants and bitangents of the plane quartics with 3,6 or 9-cyclic automorphisms, we find that a quartic curve with 6-cyclic automorphism will have 3 horizontal bitangents which form an asysgetic triple. We also discuss the linear matrix representation problem of such curves, and find a degree 6 equation of 1 variable which solves the symbolic solution of the linear matrix representation problem for the curve with 6-cyclic automorphism.
We study the arithmetic of bitangents of smooth quartics over global fields. With the aid of computer algebra systems and using Elsenhans--Jahnel's results on the inverse Galois problem for bitangents, we show that, over any global field of characteristic different from $2$, there exist smooth quartics which have bitangents over every local field, but do not have bitangents over the global field. We give an algorithm to find such quartics explicitly, and give an example over $\mathbb{Q}$. We also discuss a similar problem concerning symmetric determinantal representations. This paper is a summ…
In this paper, we introduce the terminology of matroids into the study of Zariski-pairs related to rational elliptic surfaces, aiming to simplify the presentation and arguments involved. As an application, we provide new examples of Zariski $N$-ples of relatively low degree. Namely we show that a Zariski 102-ple of degree 18 exists.
A smooth quartic curve in the complex projective plane has 36 inequivalent representations as a symmetric determinant of linear forms and 63 representations as a sum of three squares. These correspond to Cayley octads and Steiner complexes respectively. We present exact algorithms for computing these objects from the 28 bitangents. This expresses Vinnikov quartics as spectrahedra and positive quartics as Gram matrices. We explore the geometry of Gram spectrahedra and we find equations for the variety of Cayley octads. Interwoven is an exposition of much of the 19th century theory of plane quar…
Recent work of Kass--Wickelgren gives an enriched count of the $27$ lines on a smooth cubic surface over arbitrary fields. Their approach using $\mathbb{A}^1$-enumerative geometry suggests that other classical enumerative problems should have similar enrichments, when the answer is computed as the degree of the Euler class of a relatively orientable vector bundle. Here, we consider the closely related problem of the $28$ bitangents to a smooth plane quartic. However, it turns out the relevant vector bundle is not relatively orientable and new ideas are needed to produce enriched counts. We int…
In this paper, we present two related results on curves of genus 3. The first gives a bijection between the classes of the following objects: * Smooth non-hyperelliptic curves C of genus 3, with a choice of an element a in Jac(C)[2]-{0}, such that the cover C/|K_C+a|^* does not have an intermediate factor; up to isomorphism. * Plane curves E,Q in P^2 and an element in b' in Pic(E)[2]-{0}, where E,Q are of degrees 3,2, the curve E is smooth and Q,E intersect transversally ; up to projective transformations. We discuss the degenerations of this bijection, and give an interpretation of the biject…
A $K_4$-curve is a smooth, proper curve X of genus 3 over a nonarchimedean field whose Berkovich skeleton $Γ$ is a complete graph on 4 vertices. The curve X has 28 effective theta characteristics, i.e. the 28 bitangents to a canonical embedding, while $Γ$ has exactly seven tropical theta characteristics, as shown by Zharkov. We prove that the 28 effective theta characteristics of a $K_4$-curve specialize to the theta characteristics of its minimal skeleton in seven groups of four.
We show that a general plane curve of degree at least 4 is uniquely determined by the full set of its bitangent lines. This problem has an elementary solution for degree at least 5, and the paper is almost entirely devoted to curves of degree 4, where we generalize the result to nodal quartics. In other words, we show that a general curve of genus 3 can be recovered from its 28 odd theta-characteristics.
Brodsky, Joswig, Morrison and Sturmfels showed that not all abstract tropical curves of genus $3$ can be realized as a tropicalization of a quartic in the euclidean plane. In this article, we focus on the interior of the maximal cones in the moduli space and classify all curves which can be realized as a faithful tropicalization in a tropical plane. Reflecting the algebro-geometric world, we show that these are exactly those which are not realizably hyperelliptic. Our approach is constructive: For any not realizably hyperelliptic curve, we explicitly construct a realizable model of the tropica…
We describe a construction of plane quartics with prescribed Galois operation on the 28 bitangents, in the particular case of a Galois invariant Steiner hexad. As an application, we solve the inverse Galois problem for degree two del Pezzo surfaces in the corresponding particular case.
In this paper we consider plane quartics with to involutions. We compute the Dixmier invariants, the bitangents and the Matrix representation problem of these curves, showing that they have symbolic solutions for the last two questions.
We describe a construction of plane quartics with prescribed Galois operation on the 28 bitangents, in the particular case of a Galois invariant Cayley octad. As an application, we solve the inverse Galois problem for degree two del Pezzo surfaces in the corresponding particular case.
A plane quartic curve is called Lüroth if it contains the ten vertices of a complete pentalateral. White and Miller constructed in 1909 a covariant quartic 4-fold, associated to any plane quartic. We review their construction and we show how it gives a computational tool to detect if a plane quartic is Lüroth. As a byproduct, the 28 bitangents of a general plane quartic correspond to 28 singular points of the associated White-Miller quartic 4-fold.
K3 polytopes appear in complements of tropical quartic surfaces. They are dual to regular unimodular central triangulations of reflexive polytopes in the fourth dilation of the standard tetrahedron. Exploring these combinatorial objects, we classify K3 polytopes with up to $30$ vertices. Their number is $36\,297\,333$. We study the singular loci of quartic surfaces that tropicalize to K3 polytopes. These surfaces are stable in the sense of Geometric Invariant Theory.
We investigate Zariski multiples of plane curves $Z_1, \dots, Z_N$ such that each $Z_i$ is a union of a smooth quartic curve, some of its bitangents, and some of its 4-tangent conics. We show that, for plane curves of this type, the deformation types are equal to the homeomorphism types, and that the number of deformation types grows as $O(d^{62})$ when the degree $d$ of the plane curves tends to infinity.
The image of the complement of a hyperplane arrangement under a monomial map can be tropicalized combinatorially using matroid theory. We apply this to classical moduli spaces that are associated with complex reflection arrangements. Starting from modular curves, we visit the Segre cubic, the Igusa quartic, and moduli of marked del Pezzo surfaces of degrees 2 and 3. Our primary example is the Burkhardt quartic, whose tropicalization is a 3-dimensional fan in 39-dimensional space. This effectuates a synthesis of concrete and abstract approaches to tropical moduli of genus 2 curves.
In this paper we give a new proof of Caporaso and Sernesi's result which states that the general plane quartic is uniquely determined by its 28 bitangents. Our proof uses classical geometric results, as it is based on Weber's formula and on the injectivity of the $θ^{(4)}$ map.
In this article, we study the geometry of plane curves obtained by three sections and another section given as their sum on certain rational elliptic surfaces. We make use of Mumford representations of semi-reduced divisors in order to study the geometry of sections. As a result, we are able to give new proofs for some classical results on singular plane quartics and their bitangent lines.
The automorphism groups of the 27 lines on the smooth cubic surface or the 28 bitangents to the general quartic plane curve are well-known to be closely related to the Weyl groups of $E\_6$ and $E\_7$. We show how classical subconfigurations of lines, such as double-sixes, triple systems or Steiner sets, are easily constructed from certain models of the exceptional Lie algebras. For ${\mathfrak e}\_7$ and ${\mathfrak e}\_8$ we are lead to beautiful models graded over the octonions, which display these algebras as plane projective geometries of subalgebras. We also interpret the group of the bi…
Given a curve of genus 3 with an unramified double cover, we give an explicit description of the associated Prym-variety. We also describe how an unramified double cover of a non-hyperelliptic genus 3 curve can be mapped into the Jacobian of a curve of genus 2 over its field of definition and how this can be used to do Chabauty- and Brauer-Manin type calculations for curves of genus 5 with an unramified involution. As an application, we determine the rational points on a smooth plane quartic with no particular geometric properties and give examples of curves of genus 3 and 5 violating the Hass…
We present a computational study of smooth curves of degree six in the real projective plane. In the Rokhlin-Nikulin classification, there are 56 topological types, refined into 64 rigid isotopy classes. We developed software that determines the topological type of a given sextic and used it to compute empirical probability distributions on the various types. We list 64 explicit representatives with integer coefficients, and we perturb these to draw many samples from each class. This allows us to explore how many of the bitangents, inflection points and tensor eigenvectors are real. We also st…
