Exceptional divisor Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The exceptional divisor of the blowup of a complex manifold at a point is the fiber over . In complex dimension it is naturally the projective space of tangent directions at the center.
Choose holomorphic coordinates centered at . Locally, the blowup of a complex manifold at a point is
with ; away from this is an isomorphism, so it glues to . The exceptional divisor is .
The proper transform is the closure of . If , it is isomorphic to . If , the holomorphic implicit function theorem supplies coordinates in which . In the blowup chart with and for , every chart with describes the proper transform by , while the chart does not meet it. These are smooth coordinate hypersurfaces, so is smooth.
For a divisor , the line bundle associated to a divisor consists locally of meromorphic functions such that . Pulling back a local defining function for shows that its divisor is
where is the order of vanishing at of a local defining function for . Therefore
Because is smooth, when and when .
Applying the definition with gives directly
The map sends a section to its local meromorphic coefficient relative to the canonical meromorphic section of ; the divisor inequality is exactly the condition that these coefficients define a holomorphic section, and the inverse construction is local multiplication by that canonical section.
The projective linear group acts transitively on . A projective automorphism carrying to another point lifts, by the universal construction of the blowup of a complex manifold at a point, to a biholomorphism between the two blowups. Thus the biholomorphism type is independent of the center.
If , then is the divisor of a meromorphic function . Pulling back gives
so the total inverse-image divisors are linearly equivalent on . Here must mean the total transform; strict transforms need not be linearly equivalent if their multiplicities at the blown-up point differ.