Explicit models of Kummer surfaces in characteristic two

7th Symposium of the Roman Number Theory Association

I gave this talk in the 7th Symposium of the Roman Number Theory Association on the 4th of May of 2023.

This talk is based on the first half of my paper Explicit desingularisation of Kummer surfaces in characteristic two via specialisation (Gonzalez-Hernandez, 2024).

References

2024

J. Symb. Comput.

Explicit desingularisation of Kummer surfaces in characteristic two via specialisation

Alvaro Gonzalez-Hernandez

Journal of Symbolic Computation (2026), arXiv preprint, 2024

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We study the birational geometry of the Kummer surfaces associated to the Jacobian varieties of genus two curves, with a particular focus on fields of characteristic two. In order to do so, we explicitly compute a projective embedding of the Jacobian of a general genus two curve and, from this, we construct its associated Kummer surface. This explicit construction produces a model for desingularised Kummer surfaces over any field of characteristic not two, and specialising these equations to characteristic two provides a model of a partial desingularisation. Adapting the classic description of the Picard lattice in terms of tropes, we also describe how to explicitly find completely desingularised models of Kummer surfaces whenever the p-rank is not zero. In the final section of this paper, we compute an example of a Kummer surface with everywhere good reduction over a quadratic number field, and draw connections between the models we computed and a criterion that determines when a Kummer surface has good reduction at two.