Even surfaces of general type with K 2 = 8, pg = 4 and q = 0 were found by Oliverio [Ol05] as complete intersections of bidegree (6, 6) in a weighted projective space P (1, 1, 2, 3, 3).In this article we prove that the moduli space of even surfaces of general type with K 2 = 8, pg = 4 and q = 0 consists of two 35-dimensional irreducible components intersecting in a codimension one subset (the first of these components is the closure of the open set considered by Oliverio). All the surfaces in the second component have a singular canonical model, hence we get a new example of a generically nonreduced moduli space.Our result gives a posteriori a complete description of the half-canonical rings of the above even surfaces. The method of proof is, we believe, the most interesting part of the paper. After describing the graded ring of a cone we are able, combining the explicit description of some subsets of the moduli space, some deformation theoretic arguments, and finally some local algebra arguments, to describe the whole moduli space. This is the first time that the classification of a class of surfaces can only be done using moduli theory: up to now first the surfaces were classified, on the basis of some numerical inequalities, or other arguments, and later on the moduli spaces were investigated.
FABRIZIO CATANESE, WENFEI LIU, AND ROBERTO PIGNATELLIsurfaces which we mentioned above are surfaces with 4 ≤ K 2 ≤ 7; by the work of Ciliberto and Catanese, [C81] and [Cat99], existence is known for each 4 ≤ K 2 ≤ 28.Irregular surfaces with p g = 4 were later investigated in [CS02]: in this case K 2 ≥ 8 since, by [De82], one has K 2 ≥ 2p g for irregular surfaces 1 ; while K 2 ≥ 12 if the canonical map has degree 1.Surfaces with p g = 4 and K 2 = 4 were classified by Noether and Enriques, but it took the work of Horikawa and Bauer ( [Ho76a, Ho76b, Ho78, B01]) to finish the classification of the surfaces with p g = 4 and 4 ≤ K 2 ≤ 7 (necessarily regular). These are 'essentially' classified, in the sense that the moduli space is shown to be a union of certain (explicitly described) locally closed subsets: but there is missing complete knowledge of the incidence structure of these subsets of the moduli space. We refer to the survey [BCP06b] for a good account of the range 4 ≤ K 2 ≤ 7, and to [Cat97] for a previous more general survey (containing the construction of several new examples).Minimal surfaces with K 2 = 8, p g = 4, q = 0 have been the object of further work by several authors [C81, CFM97, Ol05]. The surfaces constructed by Ciliberto have a birational canonical map, are not even, and have a trivial torsion group H 1 (S, Z) (unlike the ones considered in [CFM97]); the ones constructed by Oliverio are simply connected (see [D82]), and they are even (meaning that the canonical divisor is divisible by two: i.e., the second Stiefel Whitney class w 2 (S) = 0, equivalently, the intersection form is even).Therefore, for K 2 = 8, p g = 4, q = 0 there are at least three different topological types [Ol05, Remark 5.4], contras...