Atypical Hodge Loci

Abstract. In the recent works of a number of people there has emerged a beautiful new perspective on the arithmetic properties of Hodge structures. A central result in that development appears in a paper by Baldi, Klingler, and Ullmo. In this expository work we will explain that result and give a proof. The main conceptual step is to formulate Noether-Lefschetz loci in terms of intersections of period images with Mumford-Tate subdomains of period domains. The main technical step is to use the alignment of the Hodge and root space decompositions of the Lie algebras of the associated groups and from it to use the integrability conditions associated to a Pfaffian PDE system. These integrability conditions “explain” the generally present excess intersection property associated to the integral varieties of a pair of Pfaffian exterior differential systems.