Abstract:
A conic bundle is a contraction X→Z between normal varieties of relative dimension 1 such that the anit-canonical divisor is relatively ample. In this talk, I will prove a conjecture of Shokurov which predicts that, if X→Z is a conic bundle such that X has canonical singularities, then base variety Z is always 12-lc, and the multiplicities of the fibers over codimension 1 points are bounded from above by 2. Both values 12 and 2 are sharp. This is a joint work with Chen Jiang and Yujie Luo.