Étale homotopy types of moduli stacks of polarised abelian schemes (Q504535)

In [Lond. Math. Soc. Lect. Note Ser. 242, 85--95 (1997; Zbl 0902.14019)], \textit{T. Oda} showed that the the profinite completions of the étale homotopy type of the moduli stack of hyperbolic curves of genus \(g\) with \(n\) marked points over \(\overline{\mathbb Q}\) and of the Eilenberg-Maclane space \(K(\Gamma_{g,n},1)\) of the corresponding mapping class group \(\Gamma_{g,n}\) are weakly equivalent. Here the authors prove an analogous result for the moduli stack of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension \(g\geq 1\) over \(\overline{\mathbb Q}\): the profinite completion of its étale homotopy type is weakly equivalent to the profinite completion of the Eilenberg-Maclane space \(K(\text{Sp}(2g,{\mathbb Z}),1)\). In fact, the result is stated for more general moduli stacks of polarized abelian varieties but the argument is the same. The strategy of the proof is the same as that of Oda: combining the Artin-Mazur comparison theorem between étale and complex analytic homotopy types together with a homotopy descent theorem of Cox, the authors reduce the computation of the étale homotopy type of the moduli stack to that of the homotopy type of its complex analytification. They then compute the latter by means of the analytic hypercovering obtained as the Čech nerve of the uniformization map by the Siegel upper half space. The paper is very clearly written and recalls a lot of background material for the benefit of the reader.