Product-quotient surfaces of general type that are Mori Dream

Although in recent years several authors have studied Cox rings of various varieties, such as log Fano varieties and moduli spaces of rational curves with marked points, little is known about Cox rings of varieties of general type. Consequently, only a few examples of Mori Dream spaces of general type are known. Moreover, in dimension two, a classification of Mori Dream surfaces of general type with geometric genus zero still seems far away. A particular class of surfaces that appears promising to study is the so-called product-quotient surfaces. Further more, minimal product-quotient surfaces with geometric genus zero are already classified, so the main goal is to understand which among them are Mori Dream and which are not. In a recent paper, Keum and Lee showed, among other things, that product-quotient surfaces belonging to two specific families in the classification list are Mori Dream. During the talk, we will briefly discuss the theory of product-quotient surfaces and explain the technique adopted by Keum and Lee to study their effective, nef, and semiample cones. We will then illustrate the main difficulties in studying the remaining product-quotient surfaces in the list and present some partial results in this direction, which are part of a joint work in progress with F. Polizzi.