One-motives and a conjecture of Deligne (Q4467321)

The Hodge realization \(A \mapsto H_1 (A, \mathbb Z)\) defines an equivalence from the category of complex abelian varieties to the category of torsion-free polarizable Hodge structures of type\break \(\{ (0,-1), (-1,0) \}\). In particular, any such Hodge structure occurs as the \(H_1\) of an essentially unique complex algebraic variety. The Hodge realization can be generalized to define an equivalence from the category of one-motives over \(\mathbb C\) to the category of torsion-free mixed Hodge structures \(H\) of type \(\{ (-1,-1), (-1,0),(0,-1), (0,0) \}\) with \(\text{Gr}^W_{-1} \, H\) polarizable. Thus any such mixed Hodge structure \(H\) arises from an essentially unique one-motive \(I(H)\) over \(\mathbb C\). Given a complex variety \(V\) and a nonnegative integer \(n\), let \(t^n(V)\) denote the largest mixed Hodge structure of the above type of \(H^n (V, \mathbb Z (1))/\text{torsion}\). Then there exists a well-defined one-motive \(I^n (V)\) over \(\mathbb C\) whose Hodge realization is \(t^n (V)\). It was conjectured by \textit{P. Deligne} [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 44, 5--77 (1974; Zbl 0237.14003)] that \(I^n (V)\) admits a purely algebraic definition. In this paper the author proves this conjecture for a variety \(V\) over an arbitrary field and discusses some applications and related results.