Subvarieties of abelian varieties

Abstract

We discuss various constructions which allow one to embed a principally polarized abelian variety in the jacobian of a curve. Each of these gives representatives of multiples of the minimal cohomology class for curves which in turn produce subvarieties of higher dimension representing multiples of the minimal class. We then discuss the problem of producing curves representing multiples of the minimal class via deformation-theoretic methods.