On the rational cohomology of regular surfaces isogenous to a product of curves with \(\chi(\mathcal{O}_S)=2\) (Q1633886)

A surface isogenous to a product is a quotient \(S=(C \times D)/G\) of a product of two smooth projective curves by the free action of a finite group of automorphisms. The surface is called of unmixed type if \(G\) embeds in the direct product \(\mathrm{Aut}(C) \times \mathrm{Aut}(D)\). The author investigates the rational cohomology of these surfaces \(S\) in the case where the geometric genus is one and the irregularity is zero. More precisely he proves that for each of these surfaces \(S\) there are two elliptic curves \(E_C\) and \(E_D\) such that \(H^2(S,\mathbb Q)\) and \(H^2(E_C \times E_D,\mathbb Q)\) are isomorphic as rational Hodge structures. The proof is based on representation theory and the classification of these surfaces obtained earlier by Gleissner. As a byproduct the author discovered two families of of surfaces of general type with maximal Picard number.