Constructing line bundles on algebraic varieties -- around conjectures of tate and grothendieck
The goal of this project is to investigate two conjectures in arithmetic geometry pertaining to the geometry of projective varieties over finite and number fields. These two conjectures, formulated by Tate and Grothendieck in the 1960s, predict which cohomology classes are chern classes of line bundles. They both form an arithmetic counterpart of a theorem of Lefschetz, proved in the 1940s, which itself is the only known case of the Hodge conjecture. These two long-standing conjectures are one of the aspects of a more general web of questions regarding the topology of algebraic varieties which have been emphasized by Grothendieck and have since had a central role in modern arithmetic geometry. Special cases of these conjectures, appearing for instance in the work of Tate, Deligne, Faltings, Schneider-Lang, Masser-Wüstholz, have all had important consequences.

My goal is to investigate different lines of attack towards these conjectures, building on recent work on myself and Jean-Benoît Bost on related problems. The two main directions of the proposal are as follows. Over finite fields, the Tate conjecture is related to finiteness results for certain cohomological objects. I want to understand how to relate these to hidden boundedness properties of algebraic varieties that have appeared in my recent geometric proof of the Tate conjecture for K3 surfaces. The existence and relevance of a theory of Donaldson invariants for moduli spaces of twisted sheaves over finite fields seems to be a promising and novel direction. Over number fields, I want to combine the geometric insight above with algebraization techniques developed by Bost. In a joint project, we want to investigate how these can be used to first understand geometrically major results in transcendence theory and then attack the Grothendieck period conjecture for divisors via a number-theoretic and complex-analytic understanding of universal vector extensions of abelian schemes over curves.