On <Emphasis Type="Italic">G</Emphasis>-rigid surfaces

Rigid algebraic varieties form an important class of complex varieties that exhibit interesting geometric phenomena. In this paper we propose a natural extension of rigidity to complex projective varieties with a finite group action (G-varieties) and focus on the first nontrivial case, namely, on G-rigid surfaces that can be represented as desingularizations of Galois coverings of the projective plane with Galois group G. We obtain local and global G-rigidity criteria for these G-surfaces and present several series of such surfaces that are rigid with respect to the action of the deck transformation group.