On the existence of birational surjective parametrizations of affine surfaces

Abstract: In this paper we show that not all affine rational complex surfaces can be parametrized birationally and surjectively. For this purpose, we prove that, if S is an affine complex surface whose projective closure is smooth, a necessary condition for S to admit a birational surjective parametrization from an open subset of the affine complex plane is that the infinity curve of S must contain at least one rational component. As a consequence of this result we provide examples of affine rational surfaces that do not admit birational surjective parametrizations.