The local-global property for bitangents of plane quartics

Abstract

We study the arithmetic of bitangents of smooth quartics over global fields. With the aid of computer algebra systems and using Elsenhans--Jahnel's results on the inverse Galois problem for bitangents, we show that, over any global field of characteristic different from $2$, there exist smooth quartics which have bitangents over every local field, but do not have bitangents over the global field. We give an algorithm to find such quartics explicitly, and give an example over $\Q$. We also discuss a similar problem concerning symmetric determinantal representations.