A surface of maximal canonical degree

Abstract

It has been conjectured that the optimal canonical degree of a minimal surface of general type is 36, from a work in the 70's of Beauville who proved that 36 was an upper bound. The highest canonical degree known for the problem was 16 by Persson in 1978. The purpose of this article is to confirm the conjecture by providing an explicit surface.

arXiv commentA corrigendum was added with corrections to the published version, originally written in 2018, with some references updated