Irreducible symplectic 4-folds which look like Hilb^2(K3) -- Kieran O'Grady

Simply connected compact Kähler manifolds carrying a holomorphic symplectic form spanning H^{2,0} are called irreducible symplectic. In dimension 2 they are K3 surfaces; Beauville and Huybrechts have shown that higher dimensional irreducible symplectic manifolds share many of the properties of K3 surfaces. In the '60's Kodaira proved that any two K3 surfaces are deformation equivalent. Experimental evidence suggests that the number of deformation classes of irreducible symplectic manifolds of a given dimension might be very small. We will present results that should lead to a classification of irreducible symplectic 4-folds whose 2-cohomology with 4-tuple wedge product is isomorphic to that of Hilb2 (K3) - a typical example of such a variety. Certain special 4-dimensional sextic hypersurfaces constructed by Eisenbud-Popescu-Walter play an important role in our work.