Birational Geometry of Special Quotient Foliations and Chazy's Equations

Abstract

The works of Brunella and Santos have singled out three special singular holomorphic foliations on projective surfaces having invariant rational nodal curves of positive self-intersection. These foliations can be described as quotients of foliations on some rational surfaces under cyclic groups of transformations of orders three, four, and six, respectively. Through an unexpected connection with the reduced Chazy IV, V and VI equations, we give explicit models for these foliations as degree-two foliations on the projective plane (in particular, we recover Pereira's model of Brunella's foliation). We describe the full groups of birational automorphisms of these quotient foliations, and, through this, produce symmetries for the reduced Chazy IV and V equations. We give another model for Brunella's very special foliation, one with only non-degenerate singularities, for which its characterizing involution is a quartic de Jonqui\`eres one, and for which its order-three symmetries are linear. Lastly, our analysis of the action of monomial transformations on linear foliations poses naturally the question of determining planar models for their quotients under the action of the standard quadratic Cremona involution; we give explicit formulas for these as well.