Manin's conjecture for rational points on smooth Fano varieties

Let kk be a number field and let XX be a smooth Fano variety over kk, so that KX-K_X is ample. Fix an adelic metrization of the anticanonical bundle comathcalO(KX)comathcal O(-K_X), with associated height function HKX:X(k)R0\mathsf H_{-\mathcal K_X}:X(k)\to\mathbb R_{\geq 0}. For QX(k)Q\subset X(k), write

N(Q,KX,T)=#{xQHKX(x)T}.\mathsf N(Q,-\mathcal K_X,T)=\#\{x\in Q\mid \mathsf H_{-\mathcal K_X}(x)\leq T\}.

Suppose that X(k)X(k) is not thin. Manin's conjecture. There exists a thin set ZX(k)\mathsf Z\subset X(k) such that

N(X(k)Z,KX,T)α(Nef1(X))β(X)τKX(X)T(logT)ρ(X)1,\mathsf N(X(k)\setminus\mathsf Z,-\mathcal K_X,T)\sim\alpha(\mathrm{Nef}_1(X))\beta(X)\tau_{-\mathcal K_X}(X)T(\log T)^{\rho(X)-1},

as TT\to\infty, where ρ(X)\rho(X) is the Picard rank, α(Nef1(X))\alpha(\mathrm{Nef}_1(X)) is the alpha constant of the nef cone of curves, β(X)\beta(X) is the size of Br(X)/Br(k)\mathrm{Br}(X)/\mathrm{Br}(k), and τKX(X)\tau_{-\mathcal K_X}(X) is the Tamagawa number. This is a central prediction for the distribution of rational points on Fano varieties. It is largely open even for del Pezzo surfaces, with the cited results covering several toric, quintic, and individual quartic cases but no known smooth cubic surface example.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Sho Tanimoto, “Homological sieve and Manin's conjecture”, arXiv:2605.09896 (2026).

Additional references

12 papers in this index state this conjecture (1996–2026). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2506.17071, arXiv:2505.02204, arXiv:2311.02012, arXiv:2207.03645, arXiv:2207.04348, arXiv:1812.07148, arXiv:1807.07995, arXiv:1505.04555, arXiv:math/0511041, arXiv:math/9812082, arXiv:alg-geom/9602013.

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.