Explicit construction of a plane sextic model for genus-five Howe curves, II

Abstract

A Howe curve is defined as the normalization of the fiber product over a projective line of two hyperelliptic curves. Howe curves are very useful to produce important classes of curves over fields of positive characteristic, e.g., maximal, superspecial, or supersingular ones. Determining their feasible equations explicitly is a basic problem, and it has been solved in the hyperelliptic case and in the non-hyperelliptic case with genus not greater than $4$. In this paper, we construct an explicit plane sextic model for non-hyperelliptic Howe curves of genus $5$. We also determine the number and type of singularities on our sextic model, and prove that the singularities are generically $4$ double points. Our results together with Moriya-Kudo's recent ones imply that for each $s \in \{2,3,4,5\}$, there exists a non-hyperellptic curve $H$ of genus $5$ with $\mathrm{Aut}(H) \supset \mathbf{V}_4$ such that its associated plane sextic has $s$ double points.