Semiorthogonal decompositions and birational geometry of del Pezzo surfaces over arbitrary fields

We study the birational properties of geometrically rational surfaces from a derived categorical perspective. In particular, we give a criterion for the rationality of a del Pezzo surface S over an arbitrary field, namely, that its derived category decomposes into zero-dimensional components. When S has degree at least 5 we construct explicit semiorthogonal decompositions by subcategories of modules over semisimple algebras arising as endomorphism algebras of vector bundles and we show how to retrieve information about the index of S from Brauer classes and Chern classes associated to these vector bundles.