A note on non-reduced Picard schemes

The Picard scheme of a smooth Curve and a smooth complex variety is reduced. In this note we discuss which classes of surfaces in terms of the Enriques-Kodaira classification can have non-reduced Picard schemes and whether there are restrictions on the characteristic of the ground field. It turns out that non-reduced Picard schemes are uncommon in Kodaira dimension kappa <= 0, that this phenomenon can be bounded for kappa = 2 (general type) and that it is as bad as can be for kappa = 1. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.