Explicit Brauer-Manin obstructions on plane quartics

Abstract

We describe a method to show a plane quartic over a number field has no rational points. The method can be adapted to show that a curve does not have divisors of degree 1 or 2 and can be generalized to arbitrary smooth projective curves. Our approach significantly improves on the applicability over previous 2-cover descent methods by not requiring the computation of the full $S$-unit group of the étale algebras involved. We illustrate the practicality with several examples, including examples where we determine plane quartics to be of index 2 or 4 when the maximum local index is strictly smaller.

v2: minor corrections and added references. Magma code for the examples is now available as ancillary files