English

On the deformation chirality of real cubic fourfolds

Algebraic Geometry 2019-02-20 v1 Geometric Topology

Abstract

According to our previous results, the conjugacy class of the involution induced by the complex conjugation in the homology of a real non-singular cubic fourfold determines the fourfold up to projective equivalence and deformation. Here, we show how to eliminate the projective equivalence and to obtain a pure deformation classification, that is how to respond to the chirality question: which cubics are not deformation equivalent to their image under a mirror reflection. We provide an arithmetical criterion of chirality, in terms of the eigen-sublattices of the complex conjugation involution in homology, and show how this criterion can be effectively applied taking as examples MM-cubics (that is those for which the real locus has the richest topology) and (M1)(M-1)-cubics (the next case with respect to complexity of the real locus). It happens that there is one chiral class of MM-cubics and three chiral classes of (M1)(M-1)-cubics, contrary to two achiral classes of MM-cubics and three achiral classes of (M1)(M-1)-cubics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.4882,
  title  = {On the deformation chirality of real cubic fourfolds},
  author = {S. Finashin and V. Kharlamov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.4882},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

25 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:36:16.211Z