Divisibility of torsion subgroups of abelian surfaces over number fields

Abstract

AbstractLet A be a two-dimensional abelian variety defined over a number field K. Fix a prime number $\ell $ and suppose $\#A({\mathbf {F}_{\mathfrak {p}}}) \equiv 0 \pmod {\ell ^2}$ for a set of primes ${\mathfrak {p}} \subset {\mathcal {O}_{K}}$ of density 1. When $\ell =2$ Serre has shown that there does not necessarily exist a K-isogenous $A'$ such that $\#A'(K)_{{tor}} \equiv 0 \pmod {4}$ . We extend those results to all odd $\ell $ and classify the abelian varieties that fail this divisibility principle for torsion in terms of the image of the mod- $\ell ^2$ representation.