A bound on the second Betti number of hyperkähler manifolds of complex dimension six (Q2087710)

\textit{E. Looijenga} and \textit{V. A. Lunts} [Invent. Math. 129, No. 2, 361--412 (1997; Zbl 0890.53030)] and \textit{M. Verbitsky} [Geom. Funct. Anal. 6, No. 4, 601--611 (1996; Zbl 0861.53069)] showed that the cohomology of a hyper-Kähler manifold admits and action of \(so(4, b_2-2)\), where \(b_2\) is the second Betti number. In this paper, the author proves that the second Betti number of an irreducible compact hyper-Kähler manifold of complex dimension six has an upper-bound on 23 under the assumption that only certain irreducible \(so(4, b_2-2)\) representations appear in the Looijenga-Lunts-Verbitsky decomposition. The author also proves that the second Betti number of an irreducible compact hyper-Kähler manifold of dimension 8 has an upper bound of 24 (under the validity of the Looijenga-Lunts-Verbitsky decomposition and assuming that all odd Betti numbers vanish).