Hyperelliptic Jacobians and isogenies

Abstract

In this note we mainly consider abelian varieties isogenous to hyperelliptic Jacobians. In the first part we prove that a very general hyperelliptic Jacobian of genus is not isogenous to a non-hyperelliptic Jacobian. As a consequence we obtain that the intermediate Jacobian of a very general cubic threefold is not isogenous to a Jacobian. Another corollary tells that the Jacobian of a very general d-gonal curve of genus is not isogenous to a different Jacobian. In the second part we consider a closed subvariety of the moduli space of principally polarized varieties of dimension . We show that if a very general element of is dominated by the Jacobian of a curve C and , then C is not hyperelliptic. In particular, if the general element in is simple, its Kummer variety does not contain rational curves. Finally we show that a closed subvariety of dimension such that the Jacobian of a very general element of is dominated by a hyperelliptic Jacobian is contained either in the hyperelliptic or in the trigonal locus.