Our main goal is to give a sense of recent developments in the (stable) rationality problem from the point of view of unramified cohomology and 0-cycles as well as derived categories and semiorthogonal decompositions, and how these perspectives intertwine and reflect each other. In particular, in the case of algebraic surfaces, we explain the relationship between Blochs conjecture, Chow-theoretic decompositions of the diagonal, categorical representability, and the existence of phantom subcategories of the derived category.
Download