Supersingular K3 surfaces for large primes

Abstract

Given a K3 surface X over a field of characteristic p, Artin conjectured that if X is supersingular (meaning infinite height), then its Picard rank is 22. Along with work of Nygaard–Ogus, this conjecture implies the Tate conjecture for K3 surfaces over finite fields with p≥5. We prove Artin’s conjecture under the additional assumption that X has a polarization of degree 2d with p>2d+4. Assuming semistable reduction for surfaces in characteristic p, we can improve the main result to K3 surfaces which admit a polarization of degree prime to p when p≥5.

The argument uses Borcherds’s construction of automorphic forms on O(2,n) to construct ample divisors on the moduli space. We also establish finite-characteristic versions of the positivity of the Hodge bundle and the Kulikov–Pinkham–Persson classification of K3 degenerations. In the appendix by A. Snowden, a compatibility statement is proven between Clifford constructions and integral p-adic comparison functors.