Forum of Mathematics, Sigma (Jan 2017)

ABELIAN $n$ -DIVISION FIELDS OF ELLIPTIC CURVES AND BRAUER GROUPS OF PRODUCT KUMMER & ABELIAN SURFACES

  • ANTHONY VÁRILLY-ALVARADO,
  • BIANCA VIRAY

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/fms.2017.16
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5

Abstract

Read online

Let $Y$ be a principal homogeneous space of an abelian surface, or a K3 surface, over a finitely generated extension of $\mathbb{Q}$ . In 2008, Skorobogatov and Zarhin showed that the Brauer group modulo algebraic classes $\text{Br}\,Y/\text{Br}_{1}\,Y$ is finite. We study this quotient for the family of surfaces that are geometrically isomorphic to a product of isogenous non-CM elliptic curves, as well as the related family of geometrically Kummer surfaces; both families can be characterized by their geometric Néron–Severi lattices. Over a field of characteristic $0$ , we prove that the existence of a strong uniform bound on the size of the odd torsion of $\text{Br}Y/\text{Br}_{1}Y$ is equivalent to the existence of a strong uniform bound on integers $n$ for which there exist non-CM elliptic curves with abelian $n$ -division fields. Using the same methods we show that, for a fixed prime $\ell$ , a number field $k$ of fixed degree $r$ , and a fixed discriminant of the geometric Néron–Severi lattice, $\#(\text{Br}Y/\text{Br}_{1}Y)[\ell ^{\infty }]$ is bounded by a constant that depends only on $\ell$ , $r$ , and the discriminant.