The Hessian of a general cubic surface is a nodal quartic surface, hence its desingularisation is a K3 surface. We determine the transcendental lattice of the Hessian K3 surface for various cubic surfaces (with nodes and/or Eckardt points for example). Classical invariant theory shows that the moduli space of cubic surfaces is a weighted projective space. We describe the singular locus and some other subvarieties of the moduli space.
We shall show the existence of 15 automorphic forms of weight 8 on the moduli space of marked Hessian quartic surfaces of cubic surfaces. These automorphic forms can be interpreted in terms of the coefficients of the Sylvester form of a general cubic surface.
We prove the relation between the Hodge structure of the double cover of a nonsingular cubic surface branched along its Hessian and the Hodge structure of the triple cover of the ambient projective space branched along the cubic surface. And we introduce a method to study the infinitesimal variations of Hodge structure of the double cover of the cubic surface. Using these results, we compute the Néron-Severi lattices for the double cover of a generic cubic surface and the Fermat cubic surface.
We study the connected component of the automorphism group of a cubic hypersurface over complex numbers. When the cubic hypersurface has nonzero Hessian, this group is usually small. But there are examples with unusually large automorphism groups: the secants of Severi varieties. Can we characterize them by the property of having unusually large automorphism groups? We study this question from the viewpoint of prolongations of the Lie algebras. Our result characterizes the secants of Severi varieties, among cubic hypersurfaces with nonzero Hessian and smooth singular locus, in terms of prolong…
Using a part of XJC-correspondence by Pirio and Russo, we classify cubic forms $f$ whose Hessian matrices induce matrix factorizations of themselves. When it defines a reduced hypersurface, it satisfies the "secant-singularity" correspondence, that is, it coincides with the secant locus of its singular locus. In particular, when $f$ is irreducible, its singular locus is either one of four Severi varieties.
We express the Hessian discriminant of a cubic surface in terms of fundamental invariants. This answers Question 15 from the \emph{27 questions on the cubic surface}. We also explain how to compute the fundamental invariants for smooth cubics of rank 6.
In 1899, Hutchinson presented a way to obtain a three-parameter family of Hessians of cubic surfaces as blowups of Kummer surfaces. We show that this family consists of those Hessians containing an extra class of conic curves. Based on this, we find the invariant of a cubic surface C in pentahedral form that vanishes if its Hessian is in Hutchinson's family, and we give an explicit map between cubic surfaces in pentahedral form and blowups of Kummer surfaces.
If $X = V(f) \subset \mathbb P^N$ is a reduced complex hypersurface, the hessian of $f$ (or by abusing the terminology the hessian of $X$) is the determinant of the matrix of the second derivatives of the form $f$, that is the determinant of the hessian matrix of $f$. Hypersurfaces with vanishing hessian were studied systematically for the first time in the fundamental paper [GN], where Gordan and M. Noether analyze Hesse's claims in [Hesse1, Hesse2] according to which these hypersurfaces are necessarily cones. Of course cones have vanishing hessian. Clearly the claim is true if deg(X)=2 so th…
We explore the connection between the rank of a polynomial and the singularities of its vanishing locus. We first describe the singularity of generic polynomials of fixed rank. We then focus on cubic surfaces. Cubic surfaces with isolated singularities are known to fall into 22 singularity types. We compute the rank of a cubic surface of each singularity type. This enables us to find the possible singular loci of a cubic surface of fixed rank. Finally, we study connections to the Hessian discriminant. We show that a cubic surface with singularities that are not ordinary double points lies on t…
We discuss the GIT moduli of semistable pairs consisting of a cubic curve and a line on the projective plane. We study in some detail this moduli and compare it with another moduli suggested by Alexeev. It is the moduli of pairs (with no specified semi-abelian action) consisting of a cubic curve with at worst nodal singularities and a line which does not pass through singular points of the cubic curve. Meanwhile, we make a comparison between Nakamura's compactification of the moduli of level three elliptic curves and these two moduli spaces.
Motivated by the relation between (twisted) K3 surfaces and special cubic fourfolds, we construct moduli spaces of polarized twisted K3 surfaces of any fixed degree and order. We do this by mimicking the construction of the moduli space of untwisted polarized K3 surfaces as a quotient of a bounded symmetric domain.
In this paper we compute the cohomology of moduli space of cubic fourfolds with ADE type singularities relying on Kirwan's blowup and Laza's GIT construction. More precisely, we obtain the Betti numbers of Kirwan's resolution of the moduli space. Furthermore, by applying decomposition theorem we obtain the Betti numbers of the intersection cohomology of Baily-Borel compactification of the moduli space.
We describe the GIT compactification of the moduli space of cubic fourfolds, with a special emphasis on the role played by singularities. Our main result is that a cubic fourfold with only isolated simple (A-D-E) singularities is GIT stable. Conversely, with some minor exceptions, the stability for cubic fourfolds is characterized by this condition.
We revisit the work of Lehn-Lehn-Sorger-van Straten on twisted cubic curves in a cubic fourfold not containing a plane in terms of moduli spaces. We show that the blow-up $Z'$ along the cubic of the irreducible holomorphic symplectic eightfold $Z$, described by the four authors, is isomorphic to an irreducible component of a moduli space of Gieseker stable torsion sheaves or rank three torsion free sheaves. For a very general such cubic fourfold, we show that $Z$ is isomorphic to a connected component of a moduli space of tilt-stable objects in the derived category and to a moduli space of Bri…
We study certain moduli spaces of stable vector bundles of rank two on cubic and quartic threefolds. In many cases under consideration, it turns out that the moduli space is complete and irreducible and a general member has vanishing intermediate cohomology. In one case, all except one component of the moduli space has such vector bundles.
We characterize the image of the period map for cubic fourfolds with at worst simple singularities as the complement of an arrangement of hyperplanes in the period space. It follows then that the GIT compactification of the moduli space of cubic fourfolds is isomorphic to the Looijenga's compactification associated to this arrangement. This work builds on and is a natural continuation of our previous paper on the GIT compactification of the moduli space of cubic fourfolds.
Naruki gave an explicit construction of the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces, starting from a toric variety and proceeding with blow ups and contractions. Using his result, we compute the Chow groups and the Chern classes of this moduli space.As an application we relate a recent result of Freitag on the Hilbert polynomial of a certain ring of modular forms to the Riemann-Roch theorem for the moduli space.
We construct the moduli space of cubic surfaces which do not admit a Sylvester form as an arithmetic quotient, and determine the graded ring of modular forms of even weights.
An explicit projective embedding of the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces is given. This embedding is equivariant under the Weyl group of type E6. The image is defined by a system of linear and cubic equations. To express the embedding in a most symmetric way, the target would be 79-dimensional, however the image lies in a 9-dimensional linear subspace.
The relation between the uniformizing equation of the complex hyperbolic structure on the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces and an Appell-Lauricella hypergeometric system in nine variables is clarified.
Recall that the moduli space of smooth (that is, stable) cubic curves is isomorphic to the quotient of the upper half plane by the group of fractional linear transformations with integer coefficients. We establish a similar result for stable cubic surfaces: the moduli space is biholomorphic to a quotient of the compex 4-ball by an explict arithmetic group generated by complex reflections. This identification gives interesting structural information on the moduli space and allows one to locate the points in complex hyperbolic 4-space corresponding to cubic surfaces with symmetry, e.g., the Ferm…
We show that a cubic fourfold F that is apolar to a Veronese surface has the property that its variety of power sums VSP(F,10) is singular along a K3 surface of genus 20. We prove that these cubics form a divisor in the moduli space of cubic fourfolds and that this divisor is not a Noether-Lefschetz divisor. We use this result to prove that there is no nontrivial Hodge correspondence between a very general cubic and its VSP.
A 10-dimensional symplectic moduli space of torsion sheaves on the cubic 4-fold is constructed. It parametrizes the stable rank 2 vector bundles on the hypeplane sections of the cubic 4-fold which are obtained by Serre's construction from normal elliptic quintics. The natural projection to the dual projective 5-space parametrizing the hyperplane sections is a Lagrangian fibration. The symplectic structure is closely related (and conjecturally, is equal) to the quasi-symplectic one, induced by the Yoneda pairing on the moduli space.
In the present paper, we will show that three apparently disjoint objects: Galois representations arising from twenty-seven lines on a cubic surface (number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry), Picard modular forms (automorphic forms), rigid Calabi-Yau threefolds and their arithmetic (Diophantine geometry) are intimately related to Hessian polyhedra and their invariants. We construct a Galois representation whose image is a proper subgroup of $W(E_6)$, the Weyl group of the exceptional Lie algebra $E_6$. We give a conjecture about the identification of two different kinds of $L$-function…
In this paper we realize the moduli spaces of cubic fourfolds with specified automorphism groups as arithmetic quotients of complex hyperbolic balls or type IV symmetric domains, and study their compactifications. Our results mainly depend on the well-known works about moduli space of cubic fourfolds, including the global Torelli theorem proved by Voisin ([Voi86]) and the characterization of the image of the period map, which is given by Laza ([Laz09, Laz10]) and Looijenga ([Loo09]) independently. The key input for our study of compactifications is the functoriality of Looijenga compactificati…
Allcock and Freitag recently showed that the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces is a subvariety of a nine dimensional projective space which is defined by cubic equations. They used the theory of automorphic forms on ball quotients to obtain these results. Here we describe the same embedding using Naruki's toric model of the moduli space. We also give an explicit parametrization of the tritangent divisors, we discuss another way to find equations for the image and we show that the moduli space maps, with degree at least ten, onto the unique quintic hypersurface in a five dimensional project…
In this paper we show that the moduli space of nodal cubic surfaces is isomorphic to a quotient of a 4-dimensional complex ball by an arithmetic subgroup of the unitary group. This complex ball uniformization uses the periods of certain K3 surfaces which are naturally associated to cubic surfaces. A similar uniformization is given for the covers of the moduli space corresponding to geometric markings of the Picard group or to the choice of a line on the surface. We also give a detailed description of the boundary components corresponding to singular surfaces.
We study the moduli space of pairs $(X,H)$ consisting of a cubic threefold $X$ and a hyperplane $H$ in $\mathbb P^4$. The interest in this moduli comes from two sources: the study of certain weighted hypersurfaces whose middle cohomology admit Hodge structures of $K3$ type and, on the other hand, the study of the singularity $O_{16}$ (the cone over a cubic surface). In this paper, we give a Hodge theoretic construction of the moduli space of cubic pairs by relating $(X,H)$ to certain "lattice polarized" cubic fourfolds $Y$. A period map for the pairs $(X,H)$ is then defined using the periods o…
We investigate the geometry of the Simpson moduli space M of stable sheaves on P_3 with Hilbert polynomial H(m)=3m+1 and describe explicitly the two smooth, rational components, their 11-dimensional smooth, transversal intersection and the relation between M and the Hilbert scheme Hilb_H(P_3) of cubic space curves. We also compute the Betti numbers of the Chow groups of the moduli space M.
A well known result of Clemens and Griffiths says that a smooth cubic threefold can be recovered from its intermediate Jacobian. In this paper we discuss the possible degenerations of these abelian varieties, and thus give a description of the compactification of the moduli space of cubic threefolds obtained in this way. The relation between this compactification and those constructed in the work of Allcock-Carlson-Toledo and Looijenga-Swierstra is also considered, and is similar in spirit to the relation between the various compactifications of the moduli spaces of low genus curves.
It is known that some GIT compactifications associated to moduli spaces of either points in the projective line or cubic surfaces are isomorphic to Baily-Borel compactifications of appropriate ball quotients. In this paper, we show that their respective toroidal compactifications are isomorphic to moduli spaces of stable pairs as defined in the context of the MMP. Moreover, we give a precise mixed-Hodge-theoretic interpretation of this isomorphism for the case of eight labeled points in the projective line.
The Abel-Jacobi map of the family of elliptic quintics lying on a general cubic threefold is studied. It is proved that it factors through a moduli component of stable rank 2 vector bundles on the cubic threefold with Chern numbers c_1=0, c_2=2, whose general point represents a vector bundle obtained by Serre's construction from an elliptic quintic. The elliptic quintics mapped to a point of the moduli space vary in a 5-dimensional projective space inside the Hilbert scheme of curves, and the map from the moduli space to the intermediate Jacobian is étale. As auxiliary results, the irreducibil…
Each elliptic curve can be embedded uniquely in the projective plane, up to projective equivalence. The hessian curve of the embedding is generically a new elliptic curve, whose isomorphism type depends only on that of the initial elliptic curve. One gets like this a rational map from the moduli space of elliptic curves to itself. We call it the hessian dynamical system. We compute it in terms of the $j$-invariant of elliptic curves. We deduce that, seen as a map from a projective line to itself, it has 3 critical values, which correspond to the point at infinity of the moduli space and to the…
We describe hypergeometric functions of Deligne-Mostow type for open subsets of the configuration space of six points on P^2, induced from those for seven points on P^1. The seven point ball quotient example DM(2^5,1^2) does not appear on Mostow's original list, but does appear on Thurston's corrected version. We show that DM(2^5,1^2) is a finite cover of the moduli space of cubic surfaces M_C endowed with the ball quotient structure G_C\B^4 of Allcock, Carlson, and Toledo. This answers a question of Allcock about the commensurability of G_C with the monodromy groups of Deligne-Mostow hypergeo…
The moduli space $\cM_g$ of nonsingular projective curves of genus $g$ is compactified into the moduli $\bcM_g$ of Deligne-Mumford stable curves of genus $g$. We compactify in a similar way the moduli space of abelian varieties by adding some mildly degenerating limits of abelian varieties. A typical case is the moduli space of Hesse cubics. Any Hesse cubic is GIT-stable in the sense that its $\SL(3)$-orbit is closed in the semistable locus, and conversely any GIT-stable planar cubic is one of Hesse cubics. Similarly in arbitrary dimension, the moduli space of abelian varieties is compactified…
It is well known that every smooth cubic threefold is the zero locus of the Pfaffian of a 6 x 6 skew-symmetric matrix of linear forms in P^4. To compactify the space of such Pfaffian representations of a given cubic and to study the construction in families as well as for singular or reducible cubics, it is thus natural to consider the incidence correspondence of Pfaffian representations inside the product of the space of semistable skew-symmetric 6 x 6 matrices of linear forms in P^4 and the space of cubics. Here we describe concretely the irreducible component of this incidence correspondenc…
The intermediate Jacobian map, which associates to a smooth cubic threefold its intermediate Jacobian, does not extend to the GIT compactification of the space of cubic threefolds, not even as a map to the Satake compactification of the moduli space of principally polarized abelian fivefolds. A much better "wonderful" compactification of the space of cubic threefolds was constructed by the first and fourth authors --- it has a modular interpretation, and divisorial normal crossing boundary. We prove that the intermediate Jacobian map extends to a morphism from the wonderful compactification to…
The moduli space of stable real cubic surfaces is the quotient of real hyperbolic four-space by a discrete, nonarithmetic group. The volume of the moduli space is 37π^2/1080 in the metric of constant curvature -1. Each of the five connected components of the moduli space can be described as the quotient of real hyperbolic four-space by a specific arithmetic group. We compute the volumes of these components.
We provide explicit descriptions of the generic members of Hassett's divisors $\mathcal C_d$ for relevant $18\leq d\leq 38$ and for $d=44$. In doing so, we prove that $\mathcal C_d$ is unirational for $18\leq d\leq 38,d=44$. As a corollary, we prove that the moduli space $\mathcal N_{d}$ of polarized K3 surfaces of degree $d$ is unirational for $d=14,26,38$. The case $d=26$ is entirely new, while the other two cases have been previously proven by Mukai.
For any smooth projective moduli space $M$ of Gieseker stable sheaves on a complex projective K3 surface (or an abelian surface) S, we prove that the Chow motive $\mathfrak{h}(M)$ becomes a direct summand of a motive $\bigoplus \mathfrak{h}(S^{k_i})(n_i)$ with $k_i\leq \dim(M)$. The result implies that finite dimensionality of $\mathfrak{h}(M)$ follows from finite dimensionality of $\mathfrak{h}(S)$. The technique also applies to moduli spaces of twisted sheaves and to moduli spaces of stable objects in ${\rm D}^{\rm b}(S,α)$ for a Brauer class $α\in{\rm Br}(S)$. In a similar vein, we investig…
We study the moduli space of pairs consisting of a smooth cubic surface and a smooth hyperplane section, via a Hodge theoretic period map due to Laza, Pearlstein, and the second named author. The construction associates to such a pair a so-called Eckardt cubic threefold, admitting an involution, and the period map sends the pair to the anti-invariant part of the intermediate Jacobian of this cubic threefold, with respect to this involution. Our main result is that the global Torelli theorem holds for this period map; i.e., the period map is injective. To prove the result, we describe the anti-…
We consider the moduli space of log smooth pairs formed by a cubic surface and an anticanonical divisor. We describe all compactifications of this moduli space which are constructed using Geometric Invariant Theory and the anticanonical polarization. The construction depends on a weight on the divisor. For smaller weights the stable pairs consist of mildly singular surfaces and very singular divisors. Conversely, a larger weight allows more singular surfaces, but it restricts the singularities on the divisor. The one-dimensional space of stability conditions decomposes in a wall-chamber struct…
We construct new examples of cubic surfaces, for which the Hasse principle fails. Thereby, we show that, over every number field, the counterexamples to the Hasse principle are Zariski dense in the moduli scheme of non-singular cubic surfaces.
Consider a cubic surface satisfying the mild condition that it may be described in Sylvester's pentahedral form. There is a well-known Enriques or Coble surface S with K3 cover birationally isomorphic to the Hessian surface of this cubic surface. We describe the nef cone and the (-2)-curves of S. In the case of pentahedral parameters (1, 1, 1, 1, nonzero t) we compute the automorphism group of S. For t not 1 it is the semidirect product of the free product (Z/2)*(Z/2)*(Z/2)*(Z/2) by the symmetric group S4. In the special case t=1/16 we study the action of Aut(S) on an invariant smooth rational…
We prove that the Fano variety of lines of a generic cubic fourfold containing a plane is isomorphic to a moduli space of twisted stable complexes on a K3 surface. On the other hand, we show that the Fano varieties are always birational to moduli spaces of twisted stable coherent sheaves on a K3 surface. The moduli spaces of complexes and of sheaves are related by wall-crossing in the derived category of twisted sheaves on the corresponding K3 surface.
