On Cox rings of K3 surfaces

Abstract

We study Cox rings of K3 surfaces. A first result is that a K3 surface has a finitely generated Cox ring if and only if its effective cone is rational polyhedral. Moreover, we investigate degrees of generators and relations for Cox rings of K3 surfaces of Picard number two, and explicitly compute the Cox rings of generic K3 surfaces with a non-symplectic involution that have Picard number 2 to 5 or occur as double covers of del Pezzo surfaces. Copyright © Foundation Compositio Mathematica 2010.