Smooth and Rough Positive Currents

Abstract

We study the different notions of semipositivity for (1,1) cohomology classes on K3 surfaces. We first show that every big and nef class (and every nef and rational class) is semiample, and in particular it contains a smooth semipositive representative. By contrast, we show that there exist irrational nef classes with no closed positive current representative which is smooth outside a proper analytic subset. We use this to answer negatively two questions of the second-named author. Using a result of Cantat and Dupont, we also construct examples of projective K3 surfaces with a nef R-divisor which is not semipositive.