Supersingular K3 surfaces for large primes

Given a K3 surface X over a field of characteristic p, Artin conjectured that if X is supersingular (meaning infinite height), then its Picard rank is 22. Along with work of Nygaard–Ogus, this conjecture implies the Tate conjecture for K3 surfaces over finite fields with p≥5. We prove Artin’s conjec...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Maulik, Davesh
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Format: Article
Published: Duke University Press 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115923
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7525-318X
Description
Summary:Given a K3 surface X over a field of characteristic p, Artin conjectured that if X is supersingular (meaning infinite height), then its Picard rank is 22. Along with work of Nygaard–Ogus, this conjecture implies the Tate conjecture for K3 surfaces over finite fields with p≥5. We prove Artin’s conjecture under the additional assumption that X has a polarization of degree 2d with p>2d+4. Assuming semistable reduction for surfaces in characteristic p, we can improve the main result to K3 surfaces which admit a polarization of degree prime to p when p≥5. The argument uses Borcherds’s construction of automorphic forms on O(2,n) to construct ample divisors on the moduli space. We also establish finite-characteristic versions of the positivity of the Hodge bundle and the Kulikov–Pinkham–Persson classification of K3 degenerations. In the appendix by A. Snowden, a compatibility statement is proven between Clifford constructions and integral p-adic comparison functors.