0 Ju n 20 02 SPECIAL VARIETIES AND CLASSIFICATION THEORY

A new class of compact Kähler manifolds, called special, is defined: they are the ones having no fibration with base an orbifold of general type, the orbifold structure on the base being defined by the multiple fibres of the fibration (see §1). The special manifolds are in many respect higher-dimensional generalisations of rational and elliptic curves. For example, we show that being rationally connected or having vanishing Kodaira dimension implies being special. Special manifolds can also be characterised by the absence of " Bogomolov " sheaves, (see §(5.12)). For any compact Kähler X, we further construct a fibration c X : X → C(X), which we call its core 1 , such that its fibre at the general point of X is the largest special subvariety of X passing through that point. When X is special (resp. of general type), the core is thus the constant (resp. the identity) map on X. We then conjecture and prove in low dimensions and some other cases that: 1) The core is a fibration of general type, which means that so is its base C(X), when equipped with its orbifold structure coming from the multiple fibres of c X. (We show this when κ(X) ≥ 0). 2) Special manifolds have an almost abelian fundamental group. 3 H) Special manifolds are exactly the ones having a vanishing Kobayashi pseudometric. 3 A) Projective special manifolds are exactly the ones having a " potentially dense " set of K-rational points, if defined over the field K ⊂ C, finitely generated over Q. (See definition in section 7). 4 H) The Kobayashi pseudometric of X is obtained as the pull-back of the orbifold Kobayashi pseudo-metric on C(X), which is a metric outside some proper algebraic subset. 4 A) If X is projective, defined over K, as above, the set of K-rational points of X is mapped by the core into a proper algebraic subset of C(X). These two last conjectures are the natural generalisations for arbitrary X of Lang's conjectures formulated when X is of general type. §0.Introduction (0.0) For projective curves, there exists a fundamental dichotomy between curves of genus 0 or 1 on one side, and curves of genus 2 or more on the other side. This dichotomy appears at many levels, such as: Kodaira dimension, topology (fundamental group), hyperbolicity properties (as expressed by the Kobayashi pseudo-metric), and arithmetic geometry (see [La 1,2] and section …