Characterizing Jacobians via flexes of the Kummer variety

E. Arbarello, G. Marini, I. Krichever

Published 2005-02-07, updated 2005-02-08Version 2

Given an abelian variety $X$ and a point $a\in X$ we denote by $<a>$ the closure of the subgroup of $X$ generated by $a$. Let $N=2^g-1$. We denote by $\kappa: X\to \kappa(X)\subset\mathbb P^N$ the map from $X$ to its Kummer variety. We prove that an indecomposable abelian variety $X$ is the Jacobian of a curve if and only if there exists a point $a=2b\in X\setminus\{0\}$ such that $<a>$ is irreducible and $\kappa(b)$ is a flex of $\kappa(X)$.