From Tate's elliptic curve to abeloid varieties (Q1038562)

The article under review is a nice and thorough survey on uniformization problems in \(p\)-adic analytic geometry (most of the results actually hold over any valued field with non-trivial valuation). The author gives many details and state-of-the-art results (he even makes explicit that a few old results can be improved using more recent techniques). The paper begins with an introductory section on Tate's work on the uniformization of elliptic curves [see \textit{J. Tate}, A review of non-Archimedean elliptic functions. Coates, John (ed.) et al., Elliptic curves, modular forms, and Fermat's last theorem. International Press. Ser. Number Theory 1, 162--184 (1995; Zbl 1071.11508)]. Let's recall the main result. Let \(E\) be an elliptic curve over a local field \(K\). After a finite extension, either \(E\) has good reduction (if \(|j(E)|\leq1\)) or \(E\) is isomorphic to some \({\mathbf G}_{m,K}/q^{\mathbf Z}\), with \(0<|q|<1\) (if \(|j(E)|>1\), a so-called Tate curve). The proof makes use of some kind of analytic geometry over \({\mathbf G}_{m,K}\). In order to generalize the results, Tate had to be able to do analytic geometry over more complicated spaces and he introduced rigid geometry for this purpose. The second section of the article provides a quick introduction to this theory and to formal geometry. Section 3 is devoted to a space that is a natural generalization of Tate's elliptic curve: the quotient \({\mathbf G}_{m,K}^r/M_{K}\) of a torus by a lattice. This in more involved since the quotient need not be algebraic for \(r\geq2\). However, under additional hypotheses, Mumford managed to construct a quotient which is an abelian variety over \(K\) [see \textit{D. Mumford}, Compos. Math. 24, 239--272 (1972; Zbl 0241.14020)]. In section 4, the author describes some kind of converse results, due to Raynaud: after a finite extension, every abelian variety over \(K\) admits a presentation of the form \(\hat{G}_{K}/M_K\), where \(\hat{G}_{K}\) is an extension of an abelian variety with good reduction by a split torus of dimension \(r\) and \(M_K\) is a lattice of rank \(r\). The proof uses Néron models and Grothendieck's stable reduction theorem. The next three sections deal with some technical machinery for rigid spaces, namely properness, Artin's approximation methods (which allows to extend a morphism between two affinoid domains of some spaces to an arbitrary close morphism between bigger domains) and semi-stable models. Section 8 is devoted to abeloid varieties, which can be thought of as higher dimensional analytic analogues of elliptic curves (actually group objects in the category of rigid analytic spaces whose underlying variety is smooth, proper and connected). The main result states that such an objet \(G_{K}\) can be represented as a quotient \(\hat{G}_{K}/M_{K}\), where \(\hat{G}_{K}\) is the extension of an abeloid variety with good reduction by a affine torus of dimension \(r\) and \(M_{K}\) is a lattice of rand \(r\) [see \textit{W. Lütkebohmert}, J. Reine Angew. Math. 468, 167--219 (1995; Zbl 0869.14009)]. In section 9, the author is interested in Picard functors for smooth, proper and connected rigid spaces endowed with a rational point. Under the assumption that the space admits a sufficiently nice model (strictly semi-stable), he proves that the Picard functor is representable [see \textit{U. Hartl, W. Lütkebohmert}, J. Reine Angew. Math. 528, 101--148 (2000; Zbl 1044.14007)].