Griffiths heights and pencils of hypersurfaces

Abstract

The Griffiths height of a variation of Hodge structures over a projective curve is defined as the degree of its canonical line bundle, as defined by Griffiths and generalized by Peters to allow bad reduction points. It may be seen as a geometric analog of the Kato height attached to pure motives over number fields. In this paper, we establish various formulas expressing the Griffiths height of the middle-dimensional cohomology of a pencil of projective complex hypersurfaces in terms of characteristic classes.