Periods of Hodge cycles and special values of the Gauss' hypergeometric function

Abstract

We compute periods of perturbations of a Fermat variety. This allows us to consider a subspace of the Hodge cycles defined by “simple” arithmetic conditions. We explore some examples and give an upper bound for the dimension of this subspace. As an application, we find explicit expressions involving some Gauss' hypergeometric functions which are algebraic over the field of rational functions in one variable.