Scott Complexity of Reduced Abelian $p$-Groups

Given a reduced abelian $p$-group, we give an upper bound on the Scott complexity of the group in terms of its Ulm invariants. For limit ordinals, we show that this upper bound is tight. This gives an explicit sequence of such groups with arbitrarily high Scott complexity below $\omega_1$. Along the way, we give a largely algebraic characterization of the back-and-forth relations on reduced abelian $p$-groups, making progress on an open problem from the book by Ash and Knight.