I've been teaching a topics course on deformation theory this semester; so far we've covered quite a few interesting things -- the Tian-Todorov theorem and Green-Lazarsfeld's generic vanishing theorem, for example. I just wanted to use this post to record an easy and fun example that I wasn't able to find in the literature.
Question: What is a good example of a smooth projective variety X over a field k such that the deformation function DefX is not pro-representable? Here DefX:Art/k→Sets
Answer: Let X=BlZ(P2), where Z is a set of 10 points lying on a line.
It's not totally obvious, of course, that this works. The idea of the proof follows. Given a variety X, we let DefAutX:Art/k→Sets
Proposition. Let X be a proper variety. The functor DefX is pro-representable if and only if the natural map DefAutX→DefX is formally smooth. (Here the natural map simply forgets the automorphism ψ.)
This is somewhat standard; it's an easy application of Schlessinger's criteria, for example. One way of saying this is that given a small extension 0→I→B→A→0,
Here Aut0(Y) is the set of automorphisms of Y fixing Yk. The fact that this is a long exact sequence means that the first four non-zero terms are an exact sequence of groups; that H1(X,TX)⊗I acts transitively on the fibers of the map DefX(B)→DefX(A), with kernel exactly the image of Aut0(YA); and that an element of DefX(A) lifts to an element of DefX(B) if and only if it maps to zero in H2(X,TX)⊗I. Now formal smoothness of the map DefAutX→DefX is the same as surjectivity of the map Aut0(Y)→Aut0(YA) for all small extensions and all choices of Y. This is the same as faithfulness of the action of H1(X,TX)⊗I on the fibers of the map DefX(B)→DefX(A), which is a restatement of Schlessinger's pro-representability criterion in our setting.
So why does our example X -- namely, P2 blown up at a bunch of points all lying on a line ℓ -- have non-prorepresentable deformation functor? The point is that infinitesimal automorphisms of X are precisely infinitesimal automorphisms of P2 fixing the line ℓ. But if one moves the points to general position, the infinitesimal automorphism group becomes trivial. So the map DefAutX→DefX is far from smooth. Pretty easy and cool.
Is there a reference with examples like these? I'm sure they're well-known, but I wasn't able to find any smooth proper examples in the literature.