Canonical maps of general hypersurfaces in abelian varieties (Q2055233)

This paper is devoted to canonical maps of general hypersurfaces in abelian varieties. The main result obtained is that, for a general pair \((A,X)\) of an (ample) hypersurface \(X\) in an abelian variety \(A\), the canonical map \(\Phi_X\) of \(X\) is birational onto its image if the polarization given by \(X\) is not principal (i.e., its Pfaffian \(d\) is not equal to \(1\)). This work was motivated by a theorem obtained by the first author in a joint work with \textit{F.-O. Schreyer} [in: Algebraic geometry. A volume in memory of Paolo Francia. Berlin: de Gruyter. 79--116 (2002; Zbl 1053.14048)] on canonical surfaces: if you have a polarization of type \((1, 1, 2)\) then the image \(\Sigma\) of the canonical map \(\Phi_X\) is in general a surface of degree \(12\) in \(\mathbb{P}^3\), birational to \(X\), while for the special case where \(X\) is the pull-back of the theta divisor of a curve of genus \(3\), then the canonical map has degree \(2\), and \(\Sigma\) has degree \(6\). The authors also show that, setting \(g=\dim(A)\), and letting \(d\) be the Pfaffian of the polarization given by \(X\), then if \(X\) is smooth and \(\Phi_X:X\longrightarrow\mathbb{P}^{N:=g+d-2}\) is an embedding, then necessarily they have the inequality \(d\geq g+1\), equivalent to \(N:=g+d-2\geq2\dim(X)+1\). Hence the authors formulate the following interesting conjecture, motivated by work of the second author: if \(d\geq g+1\), then, for a general pair \((A,X)\), \(\Phi_X\) is an embedding. This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and a description of the results. Section 2 is devoted to the proof of the main result. Section 3 deals with embedding obstruction. In section 4, the authors conclude this paper with some remarks on the conjecture.