The monodromy of families of subvarieties on abelian varieties

Abstract

Motivated by recent work of Lawrence-Venkatesh and Lawrence-Sawin, we show that non-isotrivial families of subvarieties in abelian varieties have big monodromy when twisted by generic rank one local systems. While Lawrence-Sawin discuss the case of subvarieties of codimension one, our results hold for subvarieties of codimension at least half the dimension of the ambient abelian variety. For the proof, we use a combination of geometric arguments and representation theory to show that the Tannaka groups of intersection complexes on such subvarieties are big.