Special birational transformations of projective spaces

Abstract

Extending some results of Crauder and Katz, and Ein and Shepherd-Barron on special Cremona transformations, we study birational transformations of the complex projective spaces onto prime Fano manifolds such that the base locus X of the transformations is smooth, irreducible and reduced. We get a complete classification when X has dimension 1, or dimension 2, or codimension 2. We also get partial results when X has dimension 3.