Chain Integral Solutions to Tautological Systems

We give a new geometrical interpretation of the local analytic solutions to a differential system, which we call a tautological system $\tau$, arising from the universal family of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces $Y_a$ in a $G$-variety $X$ of dimension $n$. First, we construct a natural topological correspondence between relative cycles in $H_n(X-Y_a,\cup D-Y_a)$ bounded by the union of $G$-invariant divisors $\cup D$ in $X$ to the solution sheaf of $\tau$, in the form of chain integrals. Applying this to a toric variety with torus action, we show that in addition to the period integrals over cycles in $Y_a$, the new chain integrals generate the full solution sheaf of a GKZ system. This extends an earlier result for hypersurfaces in a projective homogeneous variety, whereby the chains are cycles. In light of this result, the mixed Hodge structure of the solution sheaf is now seen as the MHS of $H_n(X-Y_a,\cup D-Y_a)$. In addition, we generalize the result on chain integral solutions to the case of general type hypersurfaces. This chain integral correspondence can also be seen as the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence in one homological degree. Finally, we consider interesting cases in which the chain integral correspondence possibly fails to be bijective.