Blown-up toric surfaces with non-polyhedral effective cone

Abstract

We construct examples of projective toric surfaces whose blow-up at a general point has a non-polyhedral pseudo-effective cone, both in characteristic $0$ and in every prime characteristic $p$. As a consequence, we prove that the pseudo-effective cone of the Grothendieck-Knudsen moduli space $\overline M_{0,n}$ of stable rational curves is not polyhedral for $n\geq 10$ in characteristic $0$ and in characteristic $p$, for all primes $p$. Many of these toric surfaces are related to a very interesting class of arithmetic threefolds that we call arithmetic elliptic pairs of infinite order. Their analysis in characteristic $p$ relies on tools of arithmetic geometry and Galois representations in the spirit of the Lang-Trotter conjecture, producing toric surfaces whose blow-up at a general point has a non-polyhedral pseudo-effective cone in characteristic $0$ and in characteristic $p$, for an infinite set of primes $p$ of positive density.