Jr.-Prof. Dr. Sabrina Pauli  (TU Darmstadt)

We study the problem of counting rational curves of fixed degree on a toric del Pezzo surface subject to point conditions. Over algebraically closed fields, this count is invariant under the choice of point conditions. Over non-algebraically closed fields, however, the invariance fails. For real numbers, Welschinger’s groundbreaking work introduced a signed count of real curves that restores invariance.

Building on this, Levine and Kass-Levine-Solomon-Wickelgren have developed curve counts over arbitrary fields that not only generalize Welschinger’s signed counts and classical counts over algebraically closed fields, but also encode much richer arithmetic information.

In this talk I will survey these different approaches to counting rational curves with point conditions and discuss a recent joint result with A. Jaramillo Puentes, H. Markwig, and F. Röhrle. We establish a tropical correspondence theorem for curve counts over arbitrary fields, identifying the count of algebraic curves with point conditions with a weighted count of their tropical counterparts with point conditions. The latter are combinatorial objects and there are several purely combinatorial methods to find all tropical curves with point conditions.