The decomposition groups of plane conics and plane rational cubics

Abstract

The decomposition group of an irreducible plane curve $X\subset\mathbb P^2$ is the subgroup $\mathrm{Dec}(X)\subset\mathrm{Bir}(\mathbb P^2)$ of birational maps which restrict to a birational map of $X$. We show that $\mathrm{Dec}(X)$ is generated by its elements of degree $\leq2$ when $X$ is either a conic or rational cubic curve.