We study the Chow motive (with rational coefficients) of a hypersurface X in the projective space by using the variety F(X) of l-dimensional planes contained in X. If the degree of X is sufficiently small we show that the primitive part of the motive of X is the tensor product of a direct summand in the motive of a suitable complete intersection in F(X) and the l-th twist Q(-l) of the Lefschetz motive.
We investigate graph hypersurfaces and study conditions under which graph hypersurfaces admit algebraic torus operations. This leads in principle to a computation of graph motives using the theorem of Bialynicki-Birula, provided one knows the fixed point loci in a resolution of singularities.
This small note contains some easy examples of quartic hypersurfaces that have finite-dimensional motive. As an illustration, we verify a conjecture of Voevodsky (concerning smash-equivalence) for some of these special quartics.
Let $X$ be a smooth cubic hypersurface, and let $F$ be the Fano variety of lines on $X$. We establish a relation between the Chow motives of $X$ and $F$. This relation implies in particular that if $X$ has finite-dimensional motive (in the sense of Kimura), then $F$ also has finite-dimensional motive. This proves finite-dimensionality for motives of Fano varieties of cubics of dimension $3$ and $5$, and of certain cubics in other dimensions.
Grothendieck-Chow motives of quadric hypersurfaces have provided many insights into the theory of quadratic forms. Subsequently, the landscape of motives of more general projective homogeneous varieties has begun to emerge. In particular, there have been many results which relate the motive of a one homogeneous variety to motives of other simpler or smaller ones. In this paper, we exhibit a relationship between motives of two homogeneous varieties by producing a natural rational map between them which becomes a projective bundle morphism after being resolved. This allows one to use formulas fo…
We present a method for computing the framing on the cohomology of graph hypersurfaces defined by the Feynman differential form. This answers a question of Bloch, Esnault and Kreimer in the affirmative for an infinite class of graphs for which the framings are Tate motives. Applying this method to the modular graphs of Brown and Schnetz, we find that the Feynman differential form is not of Tate type in general. This finally disproves a folklore conjecture stating that the periods of Feynman integrals of primitive graphs in phi^4 theory factorise through a category of mixed Tate motives.
We show how the notion of the transcendence degree of a zero-cycle on a smooth projective variety X is related to the structure of the motive M(X). This can be of particular interest in the context of Bloch's conjecture, especially for Godeaux surfaces, when the surface is given as a finite quotient of a suitable quintic in P^3.
We show that the Andre motive of an irreducible, symplectic variety, which is deformation equivalent to the Hilbert scheme of points on a K3 surface, is an object the category generated by its motive truncated in degree two.
Let $X_1$ and $X_2$ be deformation equivalent projective hyperkähler manifolds. We prove that the André motive of $X_1$ is abelian if and only if the André motive of $X_2$ is abelian. Applying this to manifolds of $\mbox{K3}^{[n]}$, generalized Kummer and OG6 deformation types, we deduce that their André motives are abelian. As a consequence, we prove that all Hodge classes in arbitrary degree on such manifolds are absolute. We discuss applications to the Mumford-Tate conjecture, showing in particular that it holds for even degree cohomology of such manifolds.
We consider the infinite family of Feynman graphs known as the "banana graphs" and compute explicitly the classes of the corresponding graph hypersurfaces in the Grothendieck ring of varieties as well as their Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes, using the classical Cremona transformation and the dual graph, and a blowup formula for characteristic classes. We outline the interesting similarities between these operations and we give formulae for cones obtained by simple operations on graphs. We formulate a positivity conjecture for characteristic classes of graph hypersurfaces and discuss briefly…
A remarkable result of Peter O'Sullivan asserts that the algebra epimorphism from the rational Chow ring of an abelian variety to its rational Chow ring modulo numerical equivalence admits a (canonical) section. Motivated by Beauville's splitting principle, we formulate a conjectural Section Property which predicts that for smooth projective holomorphic symplectic varieties there exists such a section of algebra whose image contains all the Chern classes of the variety. In this paper, we investigate this property for (not necessarily symplectic) varieties with Chow motive of abelian type. We i…
In this article, by combining the recent theory of noncommutative motives with the classical theory of motives, we prove that if two quadrics (or, more generally, two involution varieties) have the same Grothendieck class, then they have the same even Clifford algebra and the same signature. As an application, we show in numerous cases (e.g., when the base field is a local or global field) that two quadrics (or, more generally, two involution varieties) have the same Grothendieck class if and only if they are isomorphic.
In this note, we introduce and study position space Feynman quadrics that are the loci of divergences of the position space Feynman integrals for Euclidean massless scalar quantum field theories. We prove that the Feynman quadrics define objects in the category of mixed Tate motives for complete graphs with a bound on the number of vertices. This result shows a strong contrast with the graph hypersurfaces approach which produces also non-mixed Tate examples.
We prove that the Chow motive with integral coefficient of a geometrically rational surfaces~$S$ over a perfect field~$k$ is zero dimensional if and only if the Picard group of~$\bar{k}\times_{k}S$, where~$\bar{k}$ is an algebraic closure of~$k$, is a direct summand of a $\Gal (\bar{k}/k)$-permutation module, and~$S$ possesses a zero cycle of degree one. As shown by Colliot-Thélène in a letter to the author (which we have reproduced in the appendix) this is in turn equivalent to~$S$ having a zero cycle of degree~$1$ and $\CH_{0}(k(S)\times_{k}S)$ being torsion free.
We formulate the problem of renormalization of Feynman integrals and its relation to periods of motives in configuration space instead of momentum space. The algebro-geometric setting is provided by the wonderful compactifications of arrangements of subvarieties associated to the subgraphs of a Feynman graph and a (quasi)projective variety. The motive and the class in the Grothendieck ring are computed explicitly for these wonderful compactifications, in terms of the motive of the variety and the combinatorics of the Feynman graph, using recent results of Li Li. The pullback to the wonderful c…
Let G be an adjoint simple algebraic group of inner type. We express the Chow motive (with integral coefficients) of some anisotropic projective G-homogeneous varieties in terms of motives of simpler G-homogeneous varieties, namely, those that correspond to maximal parabolic subgroups of G. We decompose the motive of a generalized Severi-Brauer variety SB_2(A), where A is a division algebra of degree 5, into a direct sum of two indecomposable motives. As an application we provide another counter-example to the uniqueness of a direct sum decomposition in the category of motives with integral co…
We take another approach to Hitchin's strategy of computing the cohomology of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles by localization with respect to the circle-action. Our computation is done in the dimensional completion of the Grothendieck ring of varieties and starts by describing the classes of moduli stacks of chains rather than their coarse moduli spaces. As an application we show that the n-torsion of the Jacobian acts trivially on the middle dimensional cohomology of the moduli space of twisted SL_n-Higgs-bundles of degree coprime to n and we give an explicit formula for the motive of the modu…
We study the motive of the moduli space of semistable Higgs bundles of coprime rank and degree on a smooth projective curve C over a field k under the assumption that C has a rational point. We show this motive is contained in the thick tensor subcategory of Voevodsky's triangulated category of motives with rational coefficients generated by the motive of C. Moreover, over a field of characteristic zero, we prove a motivic non-abelian Hodge correspondence: the integral motives of the Higgs and de Rham moduli spaces are isomorphic.
Let $C$ be an algebraic curve of genus $g \geq 2$ and $M_L$ be the moduli space of rank 2 stable vector bundles on $C$ whose determinants are isomorphic to a fixed line bundle $L$ of degree 1 on $C.$ S. del Bano studied motives of moduli spaces of rank 2 vector bundles on $C$ and computed the motive of $M_L.$ In this note, we prove that his result gives an interesting decomposition of the motive of $M_L.$ This motivic decomposition is compatible with a conjecture of M. S. Narasimhan which predicts semi-orthogonal decomposition of derived category of the moduli space.
We prove finiteness results for Tate--Shafarevich groups in degree 2 associated with 1--motives, rely them to Leopoldt's conjecture, and present an example of a semiabelian variety with an infinite Tate--Shafarevich group in degree 2. We also establish an arithmetic duality theorem for 1--motives over number fields which complements earlier results of Harari and Szamuely in this direction.
We prove formulas for the rational Chow motives of moduli spaces of semistable vector bundles and Higgs bundles of rank 3 and coprime degree on a smooth projective curve. Our approach involves identifying criteria to lift identities in (a completion of) the Grothendieck group of effective Chow motives to isomorphisms in the category of Chow motives. For the Higgs moduli space, we use motivic Bialynicki-Birula decompositions associated to a scaling action with variation of stability and wall-crossing for moduli spaces of rank 2 pairs, which occur in the fixed locus of this action.
This is a continuation of "Rational curves on hypersurfaces of low degree", math.AG/0203088. We prove that if d^2+d+1 < n and d > 2, then for a general hypersurface X_d in P^n of degree d, for each degree e the space of rational curves of degree e on X is itself a rationally connected variety.
We study rational curves on general Fano hypersurfaces in projective space, mostly by degenerating the hypersurface along with its ambient projective space to reducible varieties. We prove results on existence of low-degree rational curves with balanced normal bundle, and reprove some results on irreducibility of spaces of rational curves of low degree.
We show that the ambiguity of Murre's Chow-Kuenneth projector for degree 1 has certain good properties, assuming only that it factors through a Chow motive of a smooth irreducible curve. This is compatible with a picture obtained by using Beilinson's conjectural mixed motives, and implies for instance the independence of the Chow motive defined by the middle Chow-Kuenneth projector for surfaces.
This article proves hypersurfaces of degree d in projective n-space are "rationally simply-connected" if $d^2 \leq n$. In a forthcoming paper, de Jong and I prove a slightly weaker result when $d^2 \leq n+1$.
We consider certain families of Calabi-Yau orbifolds and their mirror partners constructed from Fermat hypersurfaces in weighted projective 4-spaces. Our focus is the topological mirror symmetry. There are at least three known ingredients to describe the topological mirror symmetry, namely, integral vertices in reflexive polytopes, monomials in graded polynomial rings (with some group actions), and periods (and Picard-Fuchs differential equations). In this paper we will introduce Fermat motives associated to these Calabi-Yau orbifolds and then use them to give motivic interpretation of the top…
The purpose of this paper is to compute the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in various Fano varieties: quadrics, Grassmannians, products of projective space, cubic threefolds, cubic fourfolds, and complete intersection threefolds of type (2,2). This extends the techniques of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld, and the second author who computed the degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of sufficiently high degree in projective space. A theme in the paper is that the fibers of low degree rational maps from the hypersurfaces to projective space tend to l…
Let n > 2 and let d < (n+1)/2. We prove that for a general hypersurface X of degree d in P^n, all the genus 0 Kontsevich moduli spaces M_{0,n}(X,e) are irreducible, reduced, local complete intersection stacks of the expected dimension.
Let p be a positive prime number and X be a Severi-Brauer variety of a central division algebra D of degree p^n, with n>0. We describe all shifts of the motive of X in the complete motivic decomposition of a variety Y, which splits over the function field of X and satisfies the nilpotence principle. In particular, we prove the motivic decomposability of generalized Severi-Brauer varieties X(p^m,D) of right ideals in D of reduced dimension p^m, m=0,1,...,n-1, except the cases p=2, m=1 and m=0 (for any prime p), where motivic indecomposability was proven by Nikita Karpenko.
In this paper we propose and prove an explicit formula for computing the degree of Fano schemes of linear subspaces on general hypersurfaces. The method used here is based on the localization theorem and Bott's residue formula in equivariant intersection theory.
Let $C$ be a smooth projective curve of genus $g\geq 2$ over $\mathbb C$. Fix $n\geq 1$, $d\in {\mathbb Z}$. A pair $(E,ϕ)$ over $C$ consists of an algebraic vector bundle $E$ of rank $n$ and degree $d$ over $C$ and a section $ϕ\in H^0(E)$. There is a concept of stability for pairs which depends on a real parameter $τ$. Let ${\mathfrak M}_τ(n,d)$ be the moduli space of $τ$-polystable pairs of rank $n$ and degree $d$ over $C$. Here we prove that for a generic curve $C$, the moduli space ${\mathfrak M}_τ(n,d)$ satisfies the Hodge Conjecture for $n \leq 4$. For obtaining this, we prove first that…
For a hypersurface in complex projective space $X\subset \PP^n$, we investigate the singularities and Kodaira dimension of the Kontsevich moduli spaces $\Kbm{0,0}{X,e}$ parametrizing rational curves of degree $e$ on $X$. If $d+e \leq n$ and $X$ is a general hypersurface of degree $d$, we prove that $\Kbm{0,0}{X,e}$ has only canonical singularities and we conjecture the same is true for the coarse moduli space $\kbm{0,0}{X,e}$.This investigation is motivated by the question of which Fano hypersurfaces are unirational.
We show that given a smooth projective variety X over C with dim(X) > 2, an ample line bundle O(1) on X and an integer n > 1, any n distinct points on a generic hypersurface of degree d in X are linearly independent in CH_0(X) if d >> 0. This generalizes a result of C. Voisin.
Since the work of Ellingsrud and Peskine at the end of 1980s, it has been known that, with the exception of a finite number of families, smooth compact complex surfaces in $\mathbb{P}^4$ with prescribed Chern classes must lie on hypersurfaces of degree $m\leq 5$. The study of surfaces lying on a small degree hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^4$---small meaning $\leq5$---seems to be a way of obtaining empirical data leading to a better conceptual understanding of surfaces in $\mathbb{P}^4$. From this perspective, two main issues are considered in the paper: - an analogue of the Hartshorne-Lichtenbaum…
We prove a formula for the polar degree of projective hypersurfaces in terms of the Milnor data of the singularities, extending to 1-dimensional singularities the Dimca-Papadima result for isolated singularities. We discuss the semi-continuity of the polar degree in deformations, and we classify the homaloidal cubic surfaces with 1-dimensional singular locus. Some open questions are pointed out along the way.
We study the rational Chow motives of certain moduli spaces of vector bundles on a smooth projective curve with additional structure (such as a parabolic structure or Higgs field). In the parabolic case, these moduli spaces depend on a choice of stability condition given by weights; our approach is to use explicit descriptions of variation of this stability condition in terms of simple birational transformations (standard flips/flops and Mukai flops) for which we understand the variation of the Chow motives. For moduli spaces of parabolic vector bundles, we describe the change in motive under …
In this paper we show that on a general hypersurface of degree $r=3,4,5,6$ in ${\bf P}^5$ a rank 2 vector bundle $E$ splits if and only if $h^1 E(n)=h^2 E(n)=0$ for all $n \in \bf Z$.
Under a hypothesis on $k$, $d$ and $n$ that is almost the best possible, we prove that for every smooth degree $d$ hypersurface in $P^n$, the $k$-plane sections dominate the moduli space of degree $d$ hypersurface in $P^k$. Using this we prove rational simple connectedness of every smooth degree $d$ hypersurface in $P^n$, under a suitable hypothesis on $d$ and $n$ (previous results were only for general hypersurfaces).
Given a hypersurface in the complex projective $n$-space we prove several known formulas for the degree of its polar map by purely algebro-geometric methods. Furthermore, we give formulas for the degree of its polar map in terms of the degrees of the polar maps of its components. As an application, we classify the plane curves with polar map of low degree, including a very simple proof of I. Dolgachev's classification of homaloidal plane curves.
We show that complex Fano hypersurfaces can have arbitrarily large degrees of irrationality. More precisely, if we fix a Fano index e, then the degree of irrationality of a very general complex Fano hypersurface of index e and dimension n is bounded from below by a constant times $\sqrt{n}$. To our knowledge this gives the first examples of rationally connected varieties with degrees of irrationality greater than 3. The proof follows a degeneration to characteristic p argument which Kollár used to prove nonrationality of Fano hypersurfaces. Along the way we show that in a family of varieties, …
In this paper we are interested in proving that the infinitesimal variations of Hodge structure of hypersurfaces of high enough degree lie in a proper subvariety of the variety of all infinitesimal variations. This is proved using a space of symmetrizers as defined by Donagi, to identify a geometric structure carried by the variety of all infinitesimal variations of Hodge structure.
Let $X\subset\mathbb P^4$ be a very general hypersurface of degree $d\ge6$. Griffiths and Harris conjectured in 1985 that the degree of every curve $C\subset X$ is divisible by $d$. Despite substantial progress by Kollár in 1991, this conjecture is not known for a single value of $d$. Building on Kollár's method, we prove this conjecture for infinitely many $d$, the smallest one being $d=5005$. The set of these degrees $d$ has positive density. We also prove a higher-dimensional analogue of this result and construct smooth hypersurfaces defined over $\mathbb Q$ that satisfy the conjecture.
This paper studies the existence of free and very free curves on the degree 5 Fermat hypersurface in P^5 over a field of characteristic 2. We find that such curves exist in degrees 8 and 9 and not in lower degrees.
Let G be a semisimple affine algebraic group over a field F. Assuming that G becomes of inner type over some finite field extension of F of degree a power of a prime p, we investigate the structure of the Chow motives with coefficients in a finite field of characteristic p of the projective G-homogeneous varieties. The complete motivic decomposition of any such variety contains one specific summand, which is the most understandable among the others and which we call the upper indecomposable summand of the variety. We show that every indecomposable motivic summand of any projective G-homogeneou…