A refinement of the motivic volume, and specialization of birational types

Abstract

We construct an upgrade of the motivic volume by keeping track of dimensions in the Grothendieck ring of varieties. This produces a uniform refinement of the motivic volume and its birational version introduced by Kontsevich and Tschinkel to prove the specialization of birational types. We also provide several explicit examples of obstructions to stable rationality arising from this technique.

Final version, to appear in "Rationality of varieties", volume 342 of Progress in Mathematics, Birkhäuser