Artin shapes

Abstract

We introduce and study on examples a notion of the Artin shape for a motive related to a projective homogenous variety. We apply it to the problem of finding the complete motivic decomposition of the variety. Our examples cover unitary involution varieties as well as some varieties given by a quadratic Weil transfer. Some of the decompositions obtained dispel prior expectations on how motivic decompositions of projective homogeneous varieties can look like.