Rational points on quadratic elliptic surfaces

Abstract

We consider elliptic surfaces whose coefficients are degree 2 polynomials in a variable T. It was recently shown, Kollár and Mella (Amer J Math 139(4):915–936 2017), that for infinitely many rational values of T the resulting elliptic curves have rank at least 1. We prove that the Mordell–Weil rank of each such elliptic surface is at most 6 over \({{\mathbb {Q}}}\). In fact, we show that the Mordell–Weil rank of these elliptic surfaces is controlled by the number of zeros of a certain polynomial over \({{\mathbb {Q}}}\).