Hyperk\"ahler manifolds

Abstract

The aim of these notes is to acquaint the reader with important objects in complex algebraic geometry: K3 surfaces and their higher-dimensional analogs, hyperk\"ahler manifolds. These manifolds are interesting from several points of view: dynamical (some have interesting automorphism groups), arithmetical (although we will not say anything on this aspect of the theory), and geometric. It is also one of those rare cases where the Torelli theorem allows for a powerful link between the geometry of these manifolds and lattice theory. We do not prove all the results that we state. Our aim is more to provide, for specific families of hyperk\"ahler manifolds (which are projective deformations of punctual Hilbert schemes of K3 surfaces), a panorama of results about projective embeddings, automorphisms, moduli spaces, period maps and domains, rather than a complete reference guide. These results are mostly not new, except perhaps those of Appendix B (written with E. Macr\`i), where we give an explicit description of the image of the period map for these polarized manifolds.