Complements of hyperplane sub-bundles in projective space bundles over the projective line

Abstract

We establish that the isomorphy type as an abstract algebraic variety of the complement of an ample hyperplane sub-bundle H of a projective space bundle of rank r-1 over the projective line depends only on the the r-fold self-intersection of H . In particular it depends neither on the ambient bundle nor on a particular ample hyperplane sub-bundle with given r-fold self-intersection. Our proof exploits the unexpected property that every such complement comes equipped with the structure of a non trivial torsor under a vector bundle on the affine line with a double origin.