We prove Welter's trisecant conjecture: an indecomposable principally polarized abelian variety $X$ is the Jacobian of a curve if and only if there exists a trisecant of its Kummer variety $K(X)$.
Fay's trisecant formula shows that the Kummer variety of the Jacobian of a smooth projective curve has a four dimensional family of trisecant lines. We study when these lines intersect the theta divisor of the Jacobian, and prove that the Gauss map of the theta divisor is constant on these points of intersection, when defined. We investigate the relation between the Gauss map and multisecant planes of the Kummer variety as well.
Let $Θ$ be a symmetric theta divisor on an indecomposable principally polarized complex abelian variety $X$. The linear system $|2Θ|$ defines a morphism $K:X\ra |2Θ|^*$, whose image is the Kummer variety $K(X)$ of $X$. When $(X,θ)$ is the Jacobian of an algebraic curve, there are infinitely many trisecants lines to $K(X)$. Welters has conjectured that the existence of one trisecant line to the Kummer variety should characterize Jacobians. The purpose of this article is to show the following weak version of Welters conjecture: $X$ is a Jacobian if and only if there exist points $a,b,c$ of $X$ s…
This paper classifies Enriques surfaces whose K3-cover is a fixed Picard-general Jacobian Kummer surface. There are exactly 31 such surfaces. We describe the free involutions which give these Enriques surfaces explicitly. As a biproduct, we show that Aut(X) is generated by elements of order 2, which is an improvement of the theorem of S. Kondo.
We give two characterizations of Jacobians of curves with involution having fixed points in the framework of two particular cases of Welter's trisecant conjecture. The geometric form of each of these characterizations is the statement that such Jacobians are exactly those containing a shifted Abelian subvariety whose image under the Kummer map is orthogonal to an explicitly given vector.
In this paper we prove the $Γ_{00}$ conjecture of van Geemen and van der Geer, under the additional assumption that the matrix of coefficients of the tangent has rank at most 2. This assumption is satisfied by Jacobians, and thus our result gives a characterization of the locus of Jacobians among all principally polarized abelian varieties. The proof is by reduction to the (stronger version of the) characterization of Jacobians by semidegenerate trisecants, i.e. by the existence of lines tangent to the Kummer variety at one point and intersecting it in another, proven by Krichever in the cours…
We explicitly construct the Kummer variety associated to the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve of genus 3 that is defined over a field of characteristic not equal to 2 and has a Weierstraß point defined over the same field. We also construct homogeneous quartic polynomials on the Kummer variety and show that they represent the duplication map.
We describe all the elliptic fibrations with section on the Kummer surface X of the Jacobian of a very general curve C of genus 2 over an algebraically closed field of characteristic 0, modulo the automorphism group of X and the symmetric group on the Weierstrass points of C. In particular, we compute elliptic parameters and Weierstrass equations for the 25 different fibrations and analyze the reducible fibers and Mordell-Weil lattices. This answers completely a question posed by Kuwata and Shioda in 2008.
Given an abelian variety $X$ and a point $a\in X$ we denote by $<a>$ the closure of the subgroup of $X$ generated by $a$. Let $N=2^g-1$. We denote by $κ: X\to κ(X)\subset\mathbb P^N$ the map from $X$ to its Kummer variety. We prove that an indecomposable abelian variety $X$ is the Jacobian of a curve if and only if there exists a point $a=2b\in X\setminus\{0\}$ such that $<a>$ is irreducible and $κ(b)$ is a flex of $κ(X)$.
We construct and study curves with low H-constants on abelian and K3 surfaces. Using the Kummer $(16_{6})$-configurations on Jacobian surfaces and some $(16_{10})$-configurations of curves on $(1,3)$-polarized Abelian surfaces, we obtain examples of configurations of curves of genus $>1$ on a generic Jacobian K3 surface with H-constants $<-4$.
We derive formulas for the construction of all inequivalent Jacobian elliptic fibrations on the Kummer surface of two non-isogeneous elliptic curves from extremal rational elliptic surfaces by rational base transformations and quadratic twists. We then show that each such decomposition yields a description of the Picard-Fuchs system satisfied by the periods of the holomorphic two-form as either a tensor product of two Gauss' hypergeometric differential equations, an Appell hypergeometric system, or a GKZ differential system. As the answer must be independent of the fibration used, identities r…
In this article, we examine the arithmetic aspect of the Kummer-surface-type CY 3-folds $\hat{T/G}$, characterized by the crepant resolution of 3-torus-orbifold $T/G$ with only isolated singularities. Up to isomorphisms, there are only two such space $\hat{T/G}$ with $|G|=3, 7$, and both $T$ carrying the structure of triple-product structure of a CM elliptic curve. The (Griffiths) intermediate Jacobians of these $\hat{T/G}$ are identified explicitly as the corresponding elliptic curve appeared in the structure of $T$. We further provide the $\QZ$-structure of $\hat{T/G}$ and verify their modul…
We give explicit equations of smooth Jacobian Kummer surfaces of degree 8 by theta functions. As byproducts, we can write down Rosenhain's 80 hyperpanes and 32 lines on these Kummer surfaces explicitly.
We explicitly find an equation and a projective embedding of the Kummer surface associated to the Jacobian of a curve of genus 2 given by an equation of the form y^2 + h(x)y = f(x) over an arbitrary ground field as well as several maps that can be used to perform arithmetic on it. This extends earlier work by Flynn and has applications, for instance, in computations of canonical heights for genus 2 Jacobians and in cryptography.
We explore some of the interplay between Brill-Noether subvarieties of the moduli space SU_C(2,K) of rank 2 bundles with canonical determinant on a smooth projective curve and 2θdivisors, via the inclusion of the moduli space into |2θ|, singular along the Kummer variety. In particular we show that the moduli space contains all the trisecants of the Kummer and deduce that there are quadrisecant lines only if the curve is hyperelliptic; we show that for generic curves of genus <6, though no higher, bundles with >2 sections are cut out by Γ_00; and that for genus 4 this locus is precisely the Don…
We show that a smooth projective curve of genus $g$ can be reconstructed from its polarized Jacobian $(X, Θ)$ as a certain locus in the Hilbert scheme $\mathrm{Hilb}^d(X)$, for $d=3$ and for $d=g+2$, defined by geometric conditions in terms of the polarization $Θ$. The result is an application of the Gunning--Welters trisecant criterion and the Castelnuovo--Schottky theorem by Pareschi--Popa and Grushevsky, and its scheme theoretic extension by the authors.
We develop an explicit theory of Kummer varieties associated to Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves of genus 3, over any field $k$ of characteristic $\neq 2$. In particular, we provide explicit equations defining the Kummer variety $\mathcal K$ as a subvariety of $\mathbb P^7$, together with explicit polynomials giving the duplication map on $\mathcal K$. A careful study of the degenerations of this map then forms the basis for the development of an explicit theory of heights on such Jacobians when $k$ is a number field. We use this input to obtain a good bound on the difference between naive an…
We use the arithmetic of the Kummer surface associated to the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve to study the primality of integers of the form $4m^2 5^n-1$. We provide an algorithm capable of proving the primality or compositeness of most of the integers in these families and discuss in detail the necessary steps to implement this algorithm in a computer. Although an indetermination is possible, in which case another choice of initial parameters should be used, we prove that the probability of reaching this situation is exceedingly low and decreases exponentially with $n$.
We prove and conjecture results which show that Castelnuovo theory in projective space has a close analogue for abelian varieties. This is related to the geometric Schottky problem: our main result is that a principally polarized abelian variety satisfies a precise version of the Castelnuovo Lemma if and only if it is a Jacobian. This result has a surprising connection to the Trisecant Conjecture. We also give a genus bound for curves in abelian varieties.
Let X be a hyperkaehler manifold of Kummer type. We study the 4 dimensional intermediate Jacobian J^3(X) constructed out of the 3rd cohomology of X, motivated by the desire to understand the Kuga-Satake torus associated to X. We prove that there is an embedding of Hodge structures of H^2(X) into H^2(J^3(X)). It follows that if X is projective with polarization L, the projective Kuga-Satake torus of (X,L) is isogenous to the fourth power of J^3(X). By studying the cohomology ring of X, we find that there is a natural smooth quadric Q(X) in the projectivization of H^3(X), with a natural choice o…
We describe two constructions of elliptic K3 surfaces starting from the Kummer surface of the Jacobian of a genus 2 curve. These parallel the base-change constructions of Kuwata for the Kummer surface of a product of two elliptic curves. One of these also involves the analogue of an Inose fibration. We use these methods to provide explicit examples of elliptic K3 surfaces over the rationals of geometric Mordell-Weil rank 15.