Putting the p back in Prym

Abstract

After Jacobians of curves, Prym varieties are perhaps the next most studied abelian varieties. They turn out to be quite useful in a number of contexts. For technical reasons, there does not appear to be any systematic treatment of Prym varieties in characteristic 2, and due to our recent interest in this topic, the purpose of this paper is to fill in that gap. Our main result is a classification of branched covers of curves in characteristic 2 that give rise to Prym varieties. We are also interested in the case of Prym varieties in the relative setting, and so we develop that theory here as well, including an extension of Welters' Criterion.