Two moduli spaces of abelian fourfolds with an automorphism of order five

Bert van Geemen, Matthias Schuett

Published 2010-10-19, updated 2012-07-12Version 3

We find explicit projective models of a compact Shimura curve and of a (non-compact) surface which are the moduli spaces of principally polarised abelian fourfolds with an automorphism of order five. The surface has a 24-nodal canonical model in IP^4 which is the complete intersection of two S_5-invariant cubics. It is dominated by a Hilbert modular surface and we give a modular interpretation for this. We also determine the L-series of these varieties as well as those of several modular covers of the Shimura curve.