Cox rings of rational surfaces and redundant blow-ups

Abstract: We prove that the redundant blow-up preserves the finite generation of the Cox ring of a rational surface under a suitable assumption, and we study the birational structure of Mori dream rational surfaces via redundant blow-ups. It turns out that the redundant blow-up completely characterizes birational morphisms of Mori dream rational surfaces with anticanonical Iitaka dimension $0$. As an application, we construct new Mori dream rational surfaces with anticanonical Iitaka dimension $0$ and $-\infty$ of arbitrarily large Picard number.