The asymptotic Schottky problem

TL;DR

This paper investigates the large-scale geometric structure of the Jacobian locus within the moduli space of abelian varieties, showing it is asymptotically dense in the coarse geometric sense and analyzing its boundary behavior.

Contribution

It establishes that the Jacobian locus is coarsely dense in the asymptotic cone of the ambient space, providing a large-scale geometric perspective on the classical Schottky problem.

Findings

Jacobian locus is coarsely dense in the asymptotic cone of _g

Hyperelliptic Jacobian locus is also coarsely dense

Boundary points of the Jacobian locus are small in large genus

Abstract

Let $\mathcal M_g$ denote the moduli space of compact Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ and let $\mathcal A_g$ be the space of principally polarized abelian varieties of (complex) dimension $g$. Let $J:\mathcal M_g\longrightarrow \mathcal A_g$ be the map which associates to a Riemann surface its Jacobian. The map $J$ is injective, and the image $J(\mathcal M_g)$ is contained in a proper subvariety of $\mathcal A_g$ when $g\geq 4$. The classical and long-studied Schottky problem is to characterize the Jacobian locus $\mathcal J_g:=J(\mathcal M_g)$ in $\mathcal A_g$. In this paper we adress a large scale version of this problem posed by Farb and called the {\em coarse Schottky problem}: How does $\mathcal J_g$ look "from far away", or how "dense" is $\mathcal J_g$ in the sense of coarse geometry? The coarse geometry of the Siegel modular variety $\mathcal A_g$ is encoded in its asymptotic cone $\textup{Cone}_\infty(\mathcal A_g)$, which is a Euclidean simplicial cone of (real) dimension $g$. Our main result asserts that the Jacobian locus $\mathcal J_g$ is "asymptotically large", or "coarsely dense" in $\mathcal A_g$. More precisely, the subset of $\textup{Cone}_\infty(\mathcal A_g)$ determinded by $\mathcal J_g$ actually coincides with this cone. The proof also shows that the Jacobian locus of hyperelliptic curves is coarsely dense in $\mathcal A_g$ as well. We also study the boundary points of the Jacobian locus $\mathcal J_g$ in $\mathcal A_g$ and in the Baily-Borel and the Borel-Serre compactification. We show that for large genus $g$ the set of boundary points of $\mathcal J_g$ in these compactifications is "small".