On the irrationality of moduli spaces of K3 surfaces

Abstract

We study how the degrees of irrationality of moduli spaces of polarized K3 surfaces grow with respect to the genus. We prove that the growth is bounded by a polynomial function of degree $14+\varepsilon$ for any $\varepsilon>0$ and, for three sets of infinitely many genera, the bounds can be improved to degree 10. The main ingredients in our proof are the modularity of the generating series of Heegner divisors due to Borcherds and its generalization to higher codimensions due to Kudla, Millson, Zhang, Bruinier, and Westerholt-Raum. For special genera, the proof is also built upon the existence of K3 surfaces associated with certain cubic fourfolds, Gushel-Mukai fourfolds, and hyperkaehler fourfolds.Comment: v2: Results substantially improved. We use Kudla's modularity conjecture to obtain a uniform polynomial bound of the degrees of irrationality for all moduli spaces of polarized K3s. 20 page