Polarizations on abelian subvarieties of principally polarized abelian varieties with dihedral group actions (Q2636970)

The aim here is to give some examples of abelian varieties that admit a decomposition into abelian subvarieties in a sufficiently controlled way that the induced polarisation can be computed. This extra control comes about because the big abelian variety has an action of a finite group, in this case a dihedral group, given by a representation on the covering space, and the abelian subvariety arises from a subrepresentation. The first result applies to any finite group \(G\): given any faithful integral representation of degree~\(n\) and a polarisation type \(D=(d_1,\ldots,d_n)\), there exists a \(D\)-polarised abelian variety \(A\) of dimension \(n\) such that \(G\) acts on \(A\) with the given representation: in fact a \(1\)-dimensional family. In the case of the dihedral group \(D_{2n}\) one can do better: the authors exhibit a family of principally polarised abelian varieties of dimension \(n\) with a \(D_{2n}\) action, explicitly describing the period matrices. The representation \(\rho\) that this comes from is given by permutations: if \(D_{2n}\) is generated by \(r\) and \(s\) with \(r^n=s^2=rsrs=1\) then \(\rho(r)\) is the cyclic permutation \(i\mapsto i+1\) and \(\rho(s)\) is \(i\mapsto n-i\). The extent to which this representation decomposes over \({\mathbb Q}\) depends on \(n\). Mainly this paper concentrates on the case \(n=p\), an odd prime, when there are three irreducible subrepresentations. The authors compute the type of the restriction of the polarisation for each of the three corresponding abelian subvarieties. They perform similar calculations for \(n=2p\) and \(n=4\); however, whereas for \(n=p\) the abelian varieties can be read off from the period matrices, for \(n=2p\) they have to be reconstructed by asking for the abelian varieties with \(D_{2n}\) action with that representation. In the case \(n=p\), they also study the Jacobians that occur in the locus they construct. They use this to give a period matrix for the Jacobian of Klein's icoahedral genus 5 curve.