Compactified Jacobians and Torelli map (Q558618)

There are many papers devoted to compactifying (generalized) Jacobians of curves and families of curves. The approaches vary widely: some constructions use moduli of semistable rank-1 sheaves, some use semistable projective curves, some use combinatorics of cell decompositions; yet others use degenerations of principally polarized abelian varieties and various notions of stable varieties. The aim of this survey is to give a definitive account in the case of nodal curves and to show, that in this case all of the known approaches are equivalent and produce isomorphic varieties, with the degeneration of PPAVs approach being the special case of degree \(g - 1.\) The degree \(g - 1\) case deserves a special attention since in this case the compactified Jacobian is unique and comes with a canonical theta divisor. It is also intimately connected with the Torelli map. The author also gives a detailed description of the ``canonical compactified Jacobian'' in degree \(g - 1.\) Finally, he explains how Kapranov's compactification of configuration spaces can be understood as a toric analog of the extended Torelli map.