A Zariski dense exceptional set in Manin’s Conjecture: dimension 2

Abstract

Recently, Lehmann, Sengupta, and Tanimoto proposed a conjectural construction of the exceptional set in Manin’s Conjecture, which we call the geometric exceptional set. We construct a del Pezzo surface of degree 1 whose geometric exceptional set is Zariski dense. In particular, this provides the first counterexample to the original version of Manin’s Conjecture in dimension 2 in characteristic 0. Assuming the finiteness of Tate-Shafarevich groups of elliptic curves over $${\mathbb Q}$$ with j-invariant 0, we show that there are infinitely many such counterexamples.