Rikuto Ito (Nagoya University)

Date

Wednesday November 19, 2025
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Location

Jeffery Hall, Room 222

Calabi-Yau Manifolds Seminar

Speaker: Rikuto Ito (Nagoya University)

Title: Modularity for rank-21 cubic fourfolds over Q

Abstract: A cubic fourfold is a Fano variety defined by a homogeneous cubic equation in five-dimensional projective space. Cubic fourfolds share many structural similarities with K3 surfaces; in particular, when the second Picard number is at least two, Hassett (2000) showed that a cubic fourfold is cohomologically associated with a K3 surface. Under additional hypotheses, this correspondence is motivic in the sense of Chow motives (B\â€�ulles 2018). Consequently, one expects cubic fourfolds to exhibit arithmetic phenomena closely parallel to those of K3 surfaces.

In this talk, I will explain a proof of the modularity of cubic fourfolds of rank 21 defined over \mathbf{Q}. The corresponding statement for singular K3 surfaces was obtained by Livné, but under the very restrictive assumption that the Picard number is 20 over \mathbf{Q}. Our approach does not require any assumption on the Picard number over \mathbf{Q}; we only assume that the cubic fourfold has rank 21 over \mathbf{C}.

We also obtain the modularity of singular K3 surfaces without Livné’s Picard-number hypothesis, using a method that is essentially identical to the one applied to cubic fourfolds. In both settings, the resulting Galois representations are shown to arise from the same type of weight-3 CM newform. I will focus on the construction of this modular form and the shared mechanism underlying both proofs.