Del Pezzo surfaces and Mori fiber spaces in positive characteristic

Abstract

We settle a question that originates from results and remarks by Koll\'ar on extremal ray in the minimal model program: In positive characteristics, there are no Mori fibrations on threefolds with only terminal singularities whose generic fibers are geometrically non-normal surfaces. To show this we establish some general structure results for del Pezzo surfaces over imperfect ground fields. This relies on Reid's classification of non-normal del Pezzo surfaces over algebraically closed fields, combined with a detailed analysis of geometrical non-reducedness over imperfect fields of p-degree one.