Bershadsky, Cecotti, Ooguri and Vafa constructed a real-valued invariant for Calabi–Yau manifolds, which is now called the BCOV invariant. In this paper, we extend the BCOV invariant to such pairs $(X,D)$, where $X$ is a compact Kähler manifold and $D$ is a pluricanonical divisor on $X$ with simple normal crossing support. We also study the behavior of the extended BCOV invariant under blow-ups. The results in this paper lead to a joint work with Fu proving that birational Calabi–Yau manifolds have the same BCOV invariant.

Let $X\subset \mathbb{P}^{4}$ be a terminal factorial quartic $3$-fold. If $X$ is non-singular, $X$ is birationally rigid, i.e. the classical minimal model program on any terminal $\mathbb{Q}$-factorial projective variety $Z$ birational to $X$ always terminates with $X$. This no longer holds when $X$ is singular, but very few examples of non-rigid factorial quartics are known. In this article, we first bound the local analytic type of singularities that may occur on a terminal factorial quartic hypersurface $X\subset \mathbb{P}^{4}$. A singular point on such a hypersurface is of type $cA_{n}$ ($n\geqslant 1$), or of type $cD_{m}$ ($m\geqslant 4$) or of type $cE_{6},cE_{7}$ or $cE_{8}$. We first show that if $(P\in X)$ is of type $cA_{n}$, $n$ is at most $7$ and, if $(P\in X)$ is of type $cD_{m}$, $m$ is at most $8$. We then construct examples of non-rigid factorial quartic hypersurfaces whose singular loci consist (a) of a single point of type $cA_{n}$ for $2\leqslant n\leqslant 7$, (b) of a single point of type $cD_{m}$ for $m=4$ or $5$ and (c) of a single point of type $cE_{k}$ for $k=6,7$ or $8$.

We prove that the higher direct images of the structure sheaf under a birational and projective morphism between excellent and regular schemes vanish.

One is concerned with Cremona-like transformations, i.e., rational maps from $ P$n to $ P$m that are birational onto the image Y ⊂ $ P$m and, moreover, the inverse map from Y to $ P$n lifts to $ P$m. We establish a handy criterion of birationality in terms of certain syzygies and ranks of appropriate matrices and, moreover, give an effective method to explicitly obtaining the inverse map. A handful of classes of Cremona and Cremona-like transformations follow as applications.