The minimal volume of stable surfaces of rank one

We determine the minimal volume of a stable surface of rank one, and show that the surface attaining this minimum is unique up to isomorphism. This resolves a conjecture of Alexeev and the second author. Of independent interest, the decisive step of the proof uses a plurigenus inequality re-derived by an AI chatbot and applied as a pluricanonical filter; we further apply this filter to rule out additional cases in the classification of small-volume threefolds of general type, and in Kollár’s algebraic Montgomery–Yang problem. The underlying inequality has classical antecedents. To our knowledge this is the first paper in birational geometry to claim a C2-level human–AI collaboration in the sense of Feng et al., where the AI’s contribution is the recognition that this inequality functions as the decisive pluricanonical filter in the basket analysis.