The minimal Cremona degree of quartic surfaces

Abstract

Two birational projective varieties in $P^n$ are Cremona Equivalent if there is a birational modification of $P^n$ mapping one onto the other. The minimal Cremona degree of $X\subset P^n$ is the minimal integer among all degrees of varieties that are Cremona Equivalent to $X$. The Cremona Equivalence and the minimal Cremona degree is well understood for subvarieties of codimension at least $2$ while both are in general very subtle questions for divisors. In this note I compute the minimal Cremona degree of quartic surfaces in $P^3$. This allows me to show that any quartic surface of elliptic ruled type has non trivial stabilizers in the Cremona group.