Related papers: A note on Shimura subvarieties in the hyperellipti…
Oort has conjectured that there do not exist Shimura curves lying generically in the Torelli locus of curves of genus $g \geq 8$. We show that there do not exist one-dimensional Shimura families of semi-stable curves of genus $g\geq 5$ of…
Oort has conjectured that there do not exist Shimura curves contained generically in the Torelli locus of genus-$g$ curves when $g$ is large enough. In this paper we prove the Oort conjecture for Shimura curves of Mumford type and Shimura…
In this paper we study the Oort conjecture on Shimura subvarieties contained generically in the Torelli locus in the Siegel modular variety $\mathcal{A}_g$. Using the poly-stability of Higgs bundles on curves and the slope inequality of…
We show that there does not exist any Shimura curve with strictly maximal Higgs field generically in the Torelli locus of non-hyperelliptic curves of genus $g\geq 4$. In particular, Shimura curves of Mumford type are not generically in the…
Given a family of Galois coverings of the projective line we give a simple sufficient condition ensuring that the closure of the image of the family via the period mapping is a special (or Shimura) subvariety in A_g. By a computer program…
We prove that a Shimura curve in the Siegel modular variety is not generically contained in the open Torelli locus as long as the rank of unitary part in its canonical Higgs bundle satisfies a numerical upper bound. As an application we…
The Coleman-Oort conjecture says that for large $g$ there are no positive-dimensional Shimura subvarieties of $\mathsf{A}_g$ generically contained in the Jacobian locus. Counterexamples are known for $g\leq 7$. They can all be constructed…
We prove the generic exclusion of certain Shimura varieties of unitary and orthogonal types from the Torelli locus. The proof relies on a slope inequality on surface fibration due to G. Xiao, and the main result implies that certain Shimura…
We show the existence of two new Shimura subvarieties of $\mathcal{A}_2, \mathcal{A}_3$ generically contained in the Torelli locus. They provide the first examples of Shimura subvarieties obtained by means of Jacobians carrying non-trivial…
In this paper we prove there are no families of cyclic $\Z_n$-covers of elliptic curves which generate non-compact Shimura (special) curves that lie generically in the Torelli locus $T_g$ of abelian varieties with $g\geq 8$ when $n$ has a…
In this paper we give a simple Torelli type theorem for curves of genus 6 and 8 by showing that these curves can be reconstructed from their Brill-Noether varieties. Among other results, it is shown that the focal variety of a general,…
We study families of Galois covers of curves of positive genus. It is known that under a numerical condition these families yield Shimura subvarieties generically contained in the Jacobian locus. We prove that there are only 6 families…
A conjecture by Yves Andre and Frans Oort says that closed subvarieties of Shimura varieties that contain a Zariski dense subset of special points are subvarieties of Hodge type. We prove this in the case where the subvariety is a curve…
We study the locus of abelian Galois covers of $\mathbb{P}^{1}$ in $A_{g}$ and the problem of occurrence of Shimura (special) subvarieties generated by these covers in the Torelli locus $T_{g}$ inside $A_{g}$. We first investigate the…
We study the Torelli locus T_g in the moduli space A_g of abelian varieties. We consider special subvarieties (Shimura subvarieties) contained in the Torelli locus. We review the construction of some non-trivial examples, and we discuss…
We prove that there are no Shimura-Teichm\"uller curves generated by genus five translation surfaces, thereby completing the classification of Shimura-Teichm\"uller curves in general. This was conjectured by M\"oller in his original work…
We prove some lower bounds on certain nonegative twists of the canonical bundle of a subvariety of a generic hypersurface in projective space. In particular we prove that the generic sextic threefold contains no rational or elliptic curves…
We construct an infinite number of Shimura curves contained in the locus of hyperelliptic Jacobians of genus 3. In the opposite direction, we show that in genus 3 the only possible non-complete (in the moduli space of abelian threefolds)…
We prove some lower bounds on certain twists of the canonical bundle of a codimension-2 subvariety of a generic hypersurface in projective space. In particular we prove that the generic sextic threefold contains no rational or elliptic…
We show that families of Pryms of abelian Galois covers of $\mathbb{P}^1$ in $A_{g-1}$ (resp. $A_g$) do not give rise to high dimensional Shimura subvareties.