On one stable birational invariant

Abstract

This is an expository article, which contributes to the Proceedings of the conference "Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry", held in Trento in 2012. We propose that (rational) fibrations on the projective space $\p^n$ by (birationally) Abelian hypersurfaces, for an arbitrary $n\ge 2$, provide an obstruction to stable rationality of algebraic varieties. We discuss the evidence for this proposition and derive some (almost straightforward) corollaries from it.