Affine modifications and affine hypersurfaces with a very transitive automorphism group

Abstract

We study a kind of modification of an affine domain which produces another affine domain. First appeared in passing in the basic paper of O. Zariski (1942), it was further considered by E.D. Davis (1967). The first named author applied its geometric counterpart to construct contractible smooth affine varieties non-isomorphic to Euclidean spaces. Here we provide certain conditions which guarantee preservation of the topology under a modification. As an application, we show that the group of biregular automorphisms of the affine hypersurface $X\subset C^{k+2}$ given by the equation $uv=p(x_1,...,x_k)$ where $p\in C[x_1,...,x_k],$ acts $m-$transitively on the smooth part reg$X$ of $X$ for any $m\in N.$ We present examples of such hypersurfaces diffeomorphic to Euclidean spaces.

39 Pages, LaTeX; a revised version with minor changes and corrections