Inhomogeneous cubic congruences and rational points on del Pezzo surfaces

Abstract

For given non-zero integers a,b,q we investigate the density of integer solutions (x,y) to the binary cubic congruence ax^2+by^3=0 (mod q). We use this to establish the Manin conjecture for a singular del Pezzo surface of degree 2 defined over the rationals and to examine the distribution of elliptic curves with square-free discriminant.