Line bundles, connections, Deligne-Beilinson and absolute Hodge cohomology

Abstract

It is known that the Picard group of a complex manifold can be expressed as a Deligne cohomology group. One may wonder if the same holds for the Picard group of a smooth algebraic variety and Deligne-Beilinson cohomology but this is not true, as already remarked by M. Saito. We explain how one has to modify the latter, show that the Picard group can be expressed by absolute Hodge cohomology, too, and introduce an intermediate object between Picard group and usual Deligne-Beilinson cohomology group. Similarly as in the case of Deligne cohomology one can relate line bundles with a regular connection to (modified) Deligne-Beilinson cohomology. In order to take irregular connections into account one has to change the definition of Deligne-Beilinson cohomology even more.