On Atkin-Lehner quotients of Shimura curves

Abstract

Poonen and Stoll have shown that the reduced Shafarevich-Tate group of a principally polarized abelian variety over a global field can have order twice a square (the odd case) as well as a square (the even case). For a curve over a global field, they give a local diophantine criterion for its jacobian to be even or odd. In this note we use the Cherednik-Drinfeld p-adic uniformization to study the local points and divisors on certain Atkin-Lehner quotients of Shimura curves. We exhibit an explicit family of such quotient curves over the rationals with odd jacobians, with genus going to infinity, and with at most finitely many hyperelliptic members.