Subgroups of elliptic elements of the Cremona group

The Cremona group is the group of birational transformations of the complex projective plane. In this paper we classify its subgroups that consist only of elliptic elements using elementary model theory. This yields in particular a description of the structure of torsion subgroups. As an application, we prove the Tits alternative for arbitrary subgroups of the Cremona group, generalizing a result of Cantat. We also describe solvable subgroups of the Cremona group and their derived length, refining results from Déserti.

Divisibility of torsion subgroups of abelian surfaces over number fields

Let 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.