Deligne's conjecture for automorphic motives over CM-fields

Abstract: The present paper is devoted to the relations between Deligne's conjecture on critical values of motivic $L$-functions and the multiplicative relations between periods of arithmetically normalized automorphic forms on unitary groups. In the first place, we combine the Ichino--Ikeda--Neal-Harris (IINH) formula -- which is now a theorem -- with an analysis of cup products of coherent cohomological automorphic forms on Shimura varieties to establish relations between certain automorphic periods and critical values of Rankin-Selberg and Asai $L$-functions of ${\rm GL}(n)\times{\rm GL}(m)$ over CM fields. By reinterpreting these critical values in terms of automorphic periods of holomorphic automorphic forms on unitary groups, we show that the automorphic periods of holomorphic forms can be factored as products of coherent cohomological forms, compatibly with a motivic factorization predicted by the Tate conjecture. All of these results are conditional on a conjecture on non-vanishing of twists of automorphic $L$-functions of ${\rm GL}(n)$ by anticyclotomic characters of finite order, and are stated under a certain regularity condition.