Hyperelliptic Jacobians and isogenies (Q1669051)

The authors study higher dimensional hyperelliptic Jacobians and the isogeny classes thereof. For example, they prove that such a very general hyperelliptic Jacobian, of dimension at least four, is isogenous to no non-hyperelliptic Jacobian. Furthermore, the authors establish that the intermediate Jacobian of a very general cubic threefold is not isogenous to a Jacobian. In a related direction, the authors study closed subvarieties of \(\mathcal{A}_g\) the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension \(g \geq 3\). Among other results, they prove that if a very general element of such a subvariety \(\mathcal{Y}\), with \(\dim \mathcal{Y} \geq 3\), is dominated by the Jacobian of a curve, then this curve is not hyperelliptic. One point in the proof of these results involves the study of étale surjective maps between certain generalized Jacobians. Such morphisms arise as the limit of suitably defined families of isogenies of Jacobians.