Transitivity of automorphism groups of Gizatullin surfaces

Abstract

We show that the automorphism group of a certain subclass of smooth Gizatullin surfaces with a distinguished and rigid extended divisor is generated by automorphisms of A1-fibrations. Moreover, such surfaces provide examples of smooth Gizatullin surfaces with a non-transitive action of the automorphism group. Thus, they represent counterexamples to Gizatullin's conjecture. For such surfaces we give explicit orbits of the natural action of the automorphism group in some special cases. Further, we present their automorphism groups as amalgamated products of two subgroups.