Oort's conjecture on supersingular abelian varieties in odd characteristic

Abstract

Oort's conjecture asserts that for any $g \geq 2$ and any prime $p$, every geometric generic member in the supersingular locus $\mathcal{S}_g$ has automorphism group $\{ \pm 1 \}$. This has been proved very recently by Viehmann in full generality, with previously known counterexamples for $p=2$ and $g=2,3$. We construct, for any $g \geq 3$, a closed subvariety of dimension $g-1$ which contains an open dense subset $\mathcal{U}$ of $a$-invariant $g-2$ such that $\mathcal{U}$ meets every irreducible component of $\mathcal{S}_g$ and every geometric point in $\mathcal{U}$ has automorphism group $\{ \pm 1 \}$ if $p >2$. This gives an independent proof of Oort's conjecture for $p>2$. When $g>3$, so $a = g-2 > 1$, this provides complementary information to the $a=1$ locus investigated in Viehmann's work on how the automorphism groups interact with the geometry.