Weil classes on abelian varieties (Q4375512)

A Hodge class on a complex projective variety is called decomposable if it can be presented as a linear combination of products of divisor classes. A theorem of Lefschetz implies that up to dimension 3 all Hodge classes are decomposable. About 30 years ago Mumford gave a first example of a non-decomposable Hodge class. This class lives on an abelian fourfold \(X\) of CM-type. A few years later, Weil noticed that the essential ingredient in Mumford's example is the fact that the endomorphism algebra of \(X\) contains an imaginary quadratic subfield, which acts with equal multiplicities on the tangent space. To this action one associates a certain 2-dimensional subspace of ``Weil classes'' in the middle rational cohomology group which, grace to the assumption about the multiplicities, consists of Hodge classes. Moreover, Weil showed that for ``generic'' even-dimensional abelian varieties with action by an imaginary quadratic field (and the condition on the multiplicities) all non-zero Weil classes are non-decomposable. Weil's construction and its natural generalizations have numerous applications in (arithmetical) algebraic geometry. We give an explicit necessary and sufficient condition for (non-zero) generalized Weil classes to be non-decomposable.