arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Eberhard Freitag.
In the following we describe some examples of Calabi-Yau manifolds, which arise as desingularizations of certain Siegel threefolds. The first Siegel modular variety with a Calabi-Yau model and the essentially only one up to now has been discovered by Barth and Nieto.
The moduli space of cubic surfaces in complex projective space is known to be isomorphic to the quotient of the complex 4-ball by a certain arithmetic group. We apply Borcherds' techniques to construct automorphic forms for this group and show that these provide an embedding of the moduli space in 9-dimensional projective space. We also show that our automorphic forms directly encode the geometry of cubic surfaces, by showing that each of Cayley's invariants (certain cross-ratios) is simply a quotient of two of our automorphic forms.