Motivic Serre group, algebraic Sato-Tate group and Sato-Tate conjecture

Abstract

We make explicit Serre's generalization of the Sato-Tate conjecture for motives, by expressing the construction in terms of fiber functors from the motivic category of absolute Hodge cycles into a suitable category of Hodge structures of odd weight. This extends the case of abelian varietes, which we treated in a previous paper. That description was used by Fite--Kedlaya--Rotger--Sutherland to classify Sato-Tate groups of abelian surfaces; the present description is used by Fite--Kedlaya--Sutherland to make a similar classification for certain motives of weight 3. We also give conditions under which verification of the Sato-Tate conjecture reduces to the identity connected component of the corresponding Sato-Tate group.