Degree of irrationality of very general abelian surfaces

Abstract

The degree of irrationality of a projective variety $X$ is defined to be the smallest degree rational dominant map to a projective space of the same dimension. For abelian surfaces, Yoshihara computed this invariant in specific cases, while Stapleton gave a sublinear upper bound for very general polarized abelian surfaces $(A, L)$ of degree $d$. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that the degree of irrationality of a very general polarized abelian surface is uniformly bounded above by $4$, independently of the degree of the polarization. This result disproves part of a conjecture of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld and Ullery.