The hyperelliptic locus (Q1804674)

This paper studies the Schottky-type problem of characterizing hyperelliptic Jacobians among all principally polarized abelian varieties. First results concerning this problem were given by Schottky himself in 1880 proving that a Jacobian of genus three is hyperelliptic precisely when an even theta constant vanishes. In ``Tata lectures of theta. II: Jacobian theta functions and differential equations'', Prog. Math. 43 (1984; Zbl 0549.14014), \textit{D. Mumford} characterized hyperelliptic Jacobians by the vanishing and nonvanishing of certain theta constants. The main theorem of the paper states that, if an irreducible element \(\Omega \in {\mathcal H}_g\), the Siegel upper half space of degree \(g\), satisfies certain vanishing conditions \(V_{g, \eta}\), then \((\Omega, I)\) is the period matrix of a hyperelliptic Jacobian. The significance of the result is that it leads to a characterization without nonvanishing conditions and thus an algebraic description of the moduli space.