We report on $25$ families of projective Calabi-Yau threefolds that do not have a point of maximal unipotent monodromy in their moduli space. The construction is based on an analysis of certain pencils of octic arrangements that were found by C. Meyer. There are seven cases where the Picard-Fuchs operator is of order two and $18$ cases where it is of order four. The birational nature of the Picard-Fuchs operator can be used effectively to distinguish between families whose members have the same Hodge numbers.
Using Gauss-Manin derivatives of normal functions, we arrive at some remarkable results on the non-triviality of the transcendental regulator for $K_m$ of a very general projective algebraic manifold. Our strongest results are for the transcendental regulator for $K_1$ of a very general $K3$ surface. We also construct an explicit family of $K_1$ cycles on $H oplus E_8 oplus E_8$-polarized $K3$ surfaces, and show they are indecomposable by a direct evaluation of the real regulator. Critical use is made of natural elliptic fibrations, hypersurface normal forms, and an explicit parametrization by modular functions.
We use methods for computing Picard numbers of reductions of K3 surfaces in order to study the decomposability of Jacobians over number fields and the variance of Mordell-Weil ranks of families of Jacobians over different ground fields. For example, we give examples of surfaces whose Picard numbers jump in rank at all primes of good reduction using Mordell-Weil groups of Jacobians and show that the genus of curves over number fields whose Jacobians are isomorphic to a product of elliptic curves satisfying certain reduction conditions is bounded. The isomorphism result addresses the number field analogue of some questions of Ekedahl and Serre on decomposability of Jacobians of curves into elliptic curves.
We provide a simple approach for the crystalline comparison of Ainf-cohomology, and reprove the comparison between crystalline and p-adic etale cohomology for formal schemes in the case of good reduction.
We prove that $p$-determinants of a certain class of differential operators can be lifted to power series over $mathbb{Q}$. We compute these power series in terms of monodromy of the corresponding differential operators.
We compute numerical approximations of the period integrals for eleven rigid double octic Calabi--Yau threefolds and compare them with the periods of corresponding weight our cusp forms and find, as to be expected, commensurabilities. These give information on character of the correspondences of these varieties with the associated Kuga-Sato modular threefolds.