Homomorphisms of hyperelliptic jacobians

Abstract

In his previous papers (Math. Res. Letters 7 (2000), 123--13; Progress in Math. 195 (2001), 473--490; Math. Res. Letters 8 (2001), 429--435; Moscow Math. J. 2 (2002), issue 2, 403-431; Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 131 (2003), no. 1, 95--102) the author introduced certain explicit constructions of hyperelliptic jacobians without nontrivial endomorphisms. In the present paper we discuss when these jacobians are mutually non-isogenous. In addition, a special case ($n=m=3$) of our Theorem 1.2 provides the following criterion for elliptic curves $C_f: y^2=f(x)$ and $C_h: y^2=h(x)$ to be non-isogenous. (Here $f(x)$ and $h(x)$ are cubic polynomials with coefficients in a field $K$ of characteristic zero.) Suppose that $f(x)$ and $h(x)$ are irreducible over $K$, their Galois groups over $K$ coincide with the full symmetric group $S_3$, and their splitting fields are linearly disjoint over $K$. Then the elliptic curves $C_f$ and $C_h$ are non-isogenous over an algebraic closure of $K$.