Triangle varieties and surface decomposition of hyper-K\"ahler manifolds

We introduce and study the notion of "surface decomposable" variety, and discuss the possibility that any projective hyper-K\"ahler manifold is surface decomposable, which would produce new evidence for Beauville's weak splitting conjecture. We show that surface decomposability relates to the Beauville-Fujiki relation, a constraint on the cohomology ring of the variety, and that general varieties with $h^{2,0}\not=0$ are not surface decomposable. We also formalize the notion of triangle variety that is useful to produce surface decomposition. We show the existence of these geometric structures on most explicitly constructed classes of projective hyper-K\"ahler manifolds of Picard number $1$.