On the birational geometry of quartic 3-folds I

In this paper, we study the birational geometry of certain examples of mildly singular quartic 3-folds. A quartic 3-fold is an example of a Fano variety, that is, a variety $X$ with ample anticanonical sheaf $\O_X(-K_X)$. From the point of view of birational geometry they basically fall within two classes: either $X$ is ``close to being rational'', and then it has very many biregularly distinct birational models as a Fano 3-fold, or, at the other extreme, $X$ has a unique model and it is often even true that every birational selfmap of $X$ is biregular. In this paper we construct examples of singular quartic 3-folds with exactly two birational models as Fano 3-folds.