Does smooth and proper over $\mathbb Z$ imply rational? I think someone told me that this is a standard conjecture. Is it a widely held? held at all? Did someone in particular make this conjecture? write it down somewhere? give evidence for it? Would you like to provide evidence? Why rational and not, say, unirational? Fontaine's non-digitized [letter](http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1274493) to Messing shows that if $X$ is smooth and proper over $\mathbb Z$, then the low degree nondiagonal Dolbeault groups vanish $H^q(X_{\mathbb Q}; \Omega^p)=0$ for $p\ne q$, $p+q\leqslant 3$. An obvious conjecture is to remove the degree restriction. Is this expected? Does this conjecture imply the rationality one? (This hypothesis on a single space does not force rationality: there are fake projective planes that mimic the cohomology of the real projective plane, but they have finite covers that would again be smooth and proper, but which can't have such cohomology by the Atiyah-Bott fixed point formula. [a little more here](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/11066/non-simply-connected-smooth-proper-scheme-over-z/97084#97084)) ---- What I'm looking for: A citation of a survey would be ideal. Short of that, I would accept a citation of someone making this conjecture (which may well be the paper I cite above). In any event, I would be happy if people provide evidence for or against the conjecture. ---- Some definitions: *propriety* is a relative version of compactness; let's just say that the scheme is cut out of projective space by homogeneous equations with coefficients in $\mathbb Z$. *Smoothness* means that the fibers, that is, the schemes defined by the same equations considered over finite fields (or their algebraic closures) are smooth. This is stronger than regularity of the total space and more like a submersion, so by analogy with Ehresmann's theorem, all the fibers are supposed to be "the same." For example, $\operatorname{Spec}\mathbb Z[i]$ is regular, but the map to $\operatorname{Spec}\mathbb Z$ is not smooth, but ramifies at $(2)$. (Geometrically) *rational* means that that the field of rational functions with complex coefficients are the same as on $\mathbb CP^n$, namely $\mathbb C(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$. I think [this question](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/9576/smooth-proper-scheme-over-z) shows that strict rationality, a fraction field of $\mathbb Q(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$, is too much to ask for. To complete the list of relevant MO questions, would (geometric) rationality imply a Hasse principle, answering [this question](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/11316/smooth-proper-schemes-over-z-with-points-everywhere-locally)?