The principal degenerations of abelian surfaces and their polarisations (Q752121)

This article provides a very complete and detailed description of some degenerations of complex abelian surfaces with a polarization of type (1,p), \(p\geq 5\), p prime. The authors follow the steps of \textit{Y. Namikawa} [Math. Ann. 221, 97-141 and 201-241 (1976; Zbl 0306.14016 and Zbl 0327.14013)], who studied toroidal degenerations of principally polarized abelian varieties in arbitrary dimension. Having introduced a toroidal compactification of the moduli space of abelian surfaces with level structure of type \((1,p)\), the authors restrict their attention to points in the ``central boundary component'': description of the corresponding degenerate abelian surfaces, explicit construction of local degenerating families and completions thereof, extension of the polarization to these degenerations. It is then relatively straightforward to check that either the polarization is very ample and embeds the degenerate surface as an elliptic translation scroll, or it induces a 2:1 map onto an elliptic ruled surface, or it has base points. These results fit with previous results by S. Ramanan, K. Hulek and H. Lange in the smooth case.