Math Seminars.

Vangelis Mouroukos (U of M),
Arithmetic Hodge Structures and Higher Abel-Jacobi Maps (after Green, Asakura and Saito)


One of the traditional tools for the Hodge-theoretic study of algebraic cycles has been the Abel-Jacobi map, classically for divisors on Riemann surfaces and generalized by Weil and Griffiths to higher codimension cycles on varieties of arbitrary dimension. However, both the image and the kernel of the Abel-Jacobi map remain, in general, rather mysterious. Recent work by various authors associates to any complex variety a new Hodge-theoretic structure, called an arithmetic Hodge structure. Using these, one can define higher Abel-Jacobi maps from (higher) Chow groups to certain extension groups of arithmetic Hodge structures. These new invariants can be used to study the kernel and image of the Abel-Jacobi map in several interesting situations (for example, in the cases of zero-cycles on a surface and cycles on general hypersurfaces). We shall give an exposition of the above constructions and examples to illustrate that the new invariants can detect non-trivial algebraic cycles quite efficiently.