Failure of the Hasse principle on general surfaces

Abstract

AbstractWe show that transcendental elements of the Brauer group of an algebraic surface can obstruct the Hasse principle. We construct a general $K 3$ surface $X$ of degree $2$ over $ \mathbb{Q} $, together with a 2-torsion Brauer class $\alpha $ that is unramified at every finite prime, but ramifies at real points of $X$. With motivation from Hodge theory, the pair $(X, \alpha )$ is constructed from a double cover of ${ \mathbb{P} }^{2} \times { \mathbb{P} }^{2} $ ramified over a hypersurface of bidegree $(2, 2)$.