On the dimension of totally geodesic submanifolds in the Prym loci

In this paper we give a bound on the dimension of a totally geodesic submanifold of the moduli space of polarised abelian varieties of a given dimension, which is contained in the Prym locus of a (possibly) ramified double cover. This improves the already known bounds. The idea is to adapt the techniques introduced by the authors in collaboration with A. Ghigi and G. P. Pirola for the Torelli map to the case of the Prym maps of (ramified) double covers.

The index conjecture for symmetric spaces

In 1980, Oniščik [A. L. Oniščik, Totally geodesic submanifolds of symmetric spaces, Geometric methods in problems of algebra and analysis. Vol. 2, Yaroslav. Gos. Univ., Yaroslavl’ 1980, 64–85, 161] introduced the index of a Riemannian symmetric space as the minimal codimension of a (proper) totally geodesic submanifold. He calculated the index for symmetric spaces of rank {\leq 2}, but for higher rank it was unclear how to tackle the problem. In [J. Berndt, S. Console and C. E. Olmos, Submanifolds and holonomy, 2nd ed., Monogr. Res. Notes Math., CRC Press, Boca Raton 2016], [J. Berndt and C. Olmos, Maximal totally geodesic submanifolds and index of symmetric spaces, J. Differential Geom. 104 2016, 2, 187–217], [J. Berndt and C. Olmos, The index of compact simple Lie groups, Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 49 2017, 5, 903–907], [J. Berndt and C. Olmos, On the index of symmetric spaces, J. reine angew. Math. 737 2018, 33–48], [J. Berndt, C. Olmos and J. S. Rodríguez, The index of exceptional symmetric spaces, Rev. Mat. Iberoam., to appear] we developed several approaches to this problem, which allowed us to calculate the index for many symmetric spaces. Our systematic approach led to a conjecture, formulated first in [J. Berndt and C. Olmos, Maximal totally geodesic submanifolds and index of symmetric spaces, J. Differential Geom. 104 2016, 2, 187–217], for how to calculate the index. The purpose of this paper is to verify the conjecture.