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Towers of 2-covers of hyperelliptic curves. (English) Zbl 1145.11317
Summary: We give a way of constructing an unramified Galois cover of a hyperelliptic curve. The geometric Galois group is an elementary abelian $$2$$-group. The construction does not make use of the embedding of the curve in its Jacobian, and it readily displays all subcovers. We show that the cover we construct is isomorphic to the pullback along the multiplication-by-$$2$$ map of an embedding of the curve in its Jacobian.
We show that the constructed cover has an abundance of elliptic and hyperelliptic subcovers. This makes this cover especially suited for covering techniques employed for determining the rational points on curves. In particular the hyperelliptic subcovers give a chance for applying the method iteratively, thus creating towers of elementary abelian 2-covers of hyperelliptic curves.
As an application, we determine the rational points on the genus $$2$$ curve arising from the question of whether the sum of the first $$n$$ fourth powers can ever be a square. For this curve, a simple covering step fails, but a second step succeeds.

##### MSC:
 11G30 Curves of arbitrary genus or genus $$\ne 1$$ over global fields 11G10 Abelian varieties of dimension $$> 1$$ 14H40 Jacobians, Prym varieties
KANT/KASH
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