We construct a collection of families of higher Chow cycles of type $(2,1)$ on a two-dimensional family of Kummer surfaces, and prove that for a very general member, they generate a subgroup of rank $\ge 18$ in the indecomposable part of the higher Chow group. Construction of the cycles uses a finite group action on the family, and the proof of their linear independence uses Picard–Fuchs differential operators.

In the 1970s, Dwork defined the logarithmic growth (log-growth for short) filtrations for $p$-adic differential equations $Dx=0$ on the $p$-adic open unit disc $|t|<1$, which measure the asymptotic behavior of solutions $x$ as $|t|\to 1^{-}$. Then, Dwork calculated the log-growth filtration for $p$-adic Gaussian hypergeometric differential equation. In the late 2000s, Chiarellotto and Tsuzuki proposed a fundamental conjecture on the log-growth filtrations for $(\varphi ,\nabla )$-modules over $K[\![t]\!]_0$, which can be regarded as a generalization of Dwork's calculation. In this paper, we prove a generalization of the conjecture to $(\varphi ,\nabla )$-modules over the bounded Robba ring. As an application, we prove a generalization of Dwork's conjecture proposed by Chiarellotto and Tsuzuki on the specialization property for log-growth Newton polygons.