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Rationality Questions And The Derived Category, Alicia Lamarche

Theses and Dissertations

This document is roughly divided into four chapters. The first outlines basic preliminary material, definitions, and foundational theorems required throughout the text. The second chapter, which is joint work with Dr. Matthew Ballard, gives an example of a family of Fano arithmetic toric varieties in which the derived category is able to detect the existence of k-rational points. More succinctly, we show that if X is a generalized del Pezzo variety defined over a field k, then X contains a k-rational point (and is in fact k-rational, that is, birational to Pnk ) if and only if Db(X) admits a …