Motivic zeta functions and the monodromy conjecture.

The monodromy conjecture, formulated in the seventies by the Japanese mathematician Igusa, is one of the most important open problems in the theory of singularities. It predicts a remarkable connection between certain geometric and arithmetic invariants of a polynomial f with integer coefficients. The conjecture describes in a precise way how the singularities of the complex hypersurface defined by the equation f = 0 influence the asymptotic behaviour of the number of solutions of the congruence f = 0 modulo powers of a prime p. Some special cases have been proven, but the general case remains wide open. A proof of the conjecture would unveil profound relations between several branches of mathematics, in particular singularity theory and number theory. In the past years, we have developed a new interpretation of the monodromy conjecture, based on non-archimedean geometry, and we have generalized it to a larger framework. A significant success of this approach was our proof of the monodromy conjecture for one-parameter degenerations of abelian varieties. The aim of our proposal is to generalize this proof to degenerations of Calabi-Yau varieties, and to adapt the arguments to the local case of the conjecture (hypersurface singularities). Degenerations of Calabi-Yau varieties play a central role in the theory of Mirror Symmetry, and we will explore in detail the connections between the monodromy conjecture and recent developments in Mirror Symmetry (tropical constructions of degenerating Calabi-Yau varieties). We hope to achieve these goals by combining advanced tools from several research domains, in particular: motivic integration, non-archimedean geometry, Hodge theory, logarithmic geometry and tropical geometry.

Keywords:motivic zeta functions, monodromy conjecture, Calabi-Yau varieties, mirror symmetry

Disciplines:Algebra