Jacobians with a vanishing theta-null in genus 4

We study the loci of principally polarized abelian varieties with points of high multiplicity on the theta divisor. Using the heat equation and degeneration techniques, we relate these loci and their closures to each other, as well as to the singular set of the universal theta divisor. We obtain bounds on the dimensions of these loci and relations among their dimensions, and make further conjectures about their structure.

We survey the geometry of the theta divisor and discuss various loci of principally polarized abelian varieties (ppav) defined by imposing conditions on its singularities. The loci defined in this way include the (generalized) Andreotti-Mayer loci, but also other geometrically interesting cycles such as the locus of intermediate Jacobians of cubic threefolds. We shall discuss questions concerning the dimension of these cycles as well as the computation of their class in the C...

In this paper we give a lower bound for the codimension of the Andreotti-Mayer loci in the moduli space of principally polarized complex abelian varieties. We also present a conjecture on this codimension.

We study the degree of the Gauss map of the theta divisor of principally polarised complex abelian varieties. We use this to obtain a bound on the multiplicity of the theta divisor along irreducible components of its singular locus, and apply this bound in examples, and to understand the local structure of isolated singular points. We further define a stratification of the moduli space of ppav's by the degree of the Gauss map. In dimension four, we show that this stratificati...

In this paper we establish the relationships between theta functions of arbitrary order and their derivatives. We generalize our previous work math.AG/0310085 and prove that for any n>1 the map sending an abelian variety to the set of Gauss images of its points of order 2n is an embedding into an appropriate Grassmannian (note that for n=1, i.e. points of order 2, we only get generic injectivity). We further discuss the generalizations of Jacobi's derivative formula for any d...

We study various naturally defined subvarieties of the moduli space ${\mathcal A}_g$ of complex principally polarized abelian varieties (ppav) in a neighborhood of the locus of products of $g$ elliptic curves. In this neighborhood, we obtain a local description for the locus of hyperelliptic curves, reproving the recent result of Shepherd-Barron that the hyperelliptic locus is locally given by tridiagonal matrices. We further reprove and generalize to arbitrary genus the re...

In this paper we study principally polarized abelian varieties that admit an automorphism of prime order $p>2$. It turns out that certain natural conditions on the multiplicities of its action on the differentials of the first kind do guarantee that those polarized varieties are not jacobians of curves.

We study the set of isomorphism classes of principal polarizations on abelian varieties of GL2-type. As applications of our results, we construct examples of curves C, C'/\Q of genus two which are nonisomorphic over \bar \Q and share isomorphic unpolarized modular Jacobian varieties over \Q ; we also show a method to obtain genus two curves over \Q whose Jacobian varieties are isomorphic to Weil's restriction of quadratic \Q-curves, and present examples.

Let $z=(z_1, ..., z_n)$ and $\Delta=\sum_{i=1}^n \fr {\p^2}{\p z^2_i}$ the Laplace operator. The main goal of the paper is to show that the well-known Jacobian conjecture without any additional conditions is equivalent to the following what we call {\it vanishing conjecture}: for any homogeneous polynomial $P(z)$ of degree $d=4$, if $\Delta^m P^m(z)=0$ for all $m \geq 1$, then $\Delta^m P^{m+1}(z)=0$ when $m>>0$, or equivalently, $\Delta^m P^{m+1}(z)=0$ when $m> \fr 32 (3^{n-...

We study smooth curves on abelian surfaces, especially for genus 4, when the complementary subvariety in the Jacobian is also a surface. We show that up to translation there is exactly one genus 4 hyperelliptic curve on a general (1, 3)-polarised abelian surface. We investigate these curves and show that their Jacobians contain a surface and its dual as complementary abelian subvarieties.