Burt Totaro’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

Voevodsky's derived category of motives is the main arena today for the study of algebraic cycles and motivic cohomology. In this paper we study whether the inclusions of three important subcategories of motives have a left or right adjoint. These adjoint functors are useful constructions when they exist, describing the best approximation to an arbitrary motive by a motive in a given subcategory. We find a fairly complete picture: some adjoint functors exist, including a few which were previously unexplored, while others do not exist because of the failure of finite generation for Chow groups in various situations. For some base fields, we determine exactly which adjoint functors exist.

We show that a wide class of hypersurfaces in all dimensions are not stably rational. Namely, for all d at least about 2n/3, a very general complex hypersurface of degree d in P^{n+1} is not stably rational. The statement generalizes Colliot-Thelene and Pirutka's theorem that very general quartic 3-folds are not stably rational. The result covers all the degrees in which Kollar proved that a very general hypersurface is non-rational, and a bit more. For example, very general quartic 4-folds are not stably rational, whereas it was not even known whether these varieties are rational.

We show that for a very general principally polarized complex abelian 3-fold, the Chow group of algebraic cycles is infinite modulo every prime number. In particular, this gives the first examples of complex varieties with infinite Chow groups modulo 2.

We give the first examples of finite groups G such that the Chow ring of the classifying space BG depends on the base field, even for fields containing the algebraic closure of Q. As a tool, we give several characterizations of the varieties which satisfy Kunneth properties for Chow groups or motivic homology. We define the (compactly supported) motive of a quotient stack in Voevodsky's derived category of motives. This makes it possible to ask when the motive of BG is mixed Tate, which is equivalent to the motivic Kunneth property. We prove that BG is mixed Tate for various "well-behaved" finite groups G, such as the symmetric groups.

We compute the Chow groups and the Fulton-MacPherson operational Chow cohomology ring for a class of singular rational varieties including toric varieties. The computation is closely related to the weight filtration on the ordinary cohomology of these varieties. We use the computation to answer one of the open problems about operational Chow cohomology: it does not have a natural map to ordinary cohomology.

This paper determines all the possible endomorphism algebras for polarizable Q-Hodge structures with Hodge numbers (n,0,…,0,n). This generalizes the classification of the possible endomorphism algebras of abelian varieties by Albert and Shimura. As with abelian varieties, the most interesting feature of the classification is that in certain cases, every Hodge structure on which a given algebra acts must have extra endomorphisms.

This paper determines all the possible endomorphism algebras for polarizable Q-Hodge structures of type (n,0,...,0,n). This generalizes the classification of the possible endomorphism algebras of abelian varieties by Albert and Shimura. As with abelian varieties, the most interesting feature of the classification is that in certain cases, every Hodge structure on which a given algebra acts must have extra endomorphisms.

Hassett and Tschinkel gave counterexamples to the integral Hodge conjecture among 3-folds over a number field. We work out their method in detail, showing that essentially all known counterexamples to the integral Hodge conjecture over the complex numbers can be made to work over a number field.

Esnault asked whether every smooth complex projective variety with infinite fundamental group has a nonzero symmetric differential (a section of a symmetric power of the cotangent bundle). In a sense, this would mean that every variety with infinite fundamental group has some nonpositive curvature. We show that the answer to Esnault's question is positive when the fundamental group has a finite-dimensional representation over some field with infinite image. This applies to all known varieties with infinite fundamental group. Along the way, we produce many symmetric differentials on the base of a variation of Hodge structures. One interest of these results is that symmetric differentials give information in the direction of Kobayashi hyperbolicity. For example, they limit how many rational curves the variety can contain.

Group cohomology reveals a deep relationship between algebra and topology, and its recent applications have provided important insights into the Hodge conjecture and algebraic geometry more broadly. This book presents a coherent suite of computational tools for the study of group cohomology and algebraic cycles. Early chapters synthesize background material from topology, algebraic geometry, and commutative algebra so readers do not have to form connections between the literatures on their own. Later chapters demonstrate Peter Symonds's influential proof of David Benson's regularity conjecture, offering several new variants and improvements. Complete with concrete examples and computations throughout, and a list of open problems for further study, this book will be valuable to graduate students and researchers in algebraic geometry and related fields.