On Subvarieties of Abelian Varieties with degenerate Gauss mapping

Abstract

We show that for an irreducible subvariety Y of an abelian variety X the Gauss mapping, from the conormal bundle of $Y$ to the dual of the tangent space of $X$ at the origin, is not dominant if and only if Y is degenerate in the sense that there exists a nontrivial abelian subvariety A of X such that A+Y=Y holds