Variations of Mixed Hodge Structures of Multiple Polylogarithms

http://dx.doi.org/10.4153/CJM-2004-057-2
Canad. J. Math. 56(2004), 1308-1338

  Published:2004-12-01
 Printed: Dec 2004

It is well known that multiple polylogarithms give rise to good unipotent variations of mixed Hodge-Tate structures. In this paper we shall {\em explicitly} determine these structures related to multiple logarithms and some other multiple polylogarithms of lower weights. The purpose of this explicit construction is to give some important applications: First we study the limit of mixed Hodge-Tate structures and make a conjecture relating the variations of mixed Hodge-Tate structures of multiple logarithms to those of general multiple {\em poly}\/logarithms. Then following Deligne and Beilinson we describe an approach to defining the single-valued real analytic version of the multiple polylogarithms which generalizes the well-known result of Zagier on classical polylogarithms. In the process we find some interesting identities relating single-valued multiple polylogarithms of the same weight $k$ when $k=2$ and 3. At the end of this paper, motivated by Zagier's conjecture we pose a problem which relates the special values of multiple Dedekind zeta functions of a number field to the single-valued version of multiple polylogarithms.