This series of three talks is the first part of an introductory course on the generalized Sato-Tate conjecture, made in collaboration with Andrew V. Sutherland at the Winter School "Frobenius distributions on curves", celebrated in Luminy in February 2014. In the first talk, some general background following Serre's works is introduced: equidistribution and its connexion to L-functions, the Sato-Tate group and the Sato-Tate conjecture. In the second talk, we present the Sato-Tate axiomatic, which leads us to some Lie group theoretic classification results. The last part of the talk is devoted to illustrate the methods involved in the proof of this kind of results by considering a concrete example. In the third and final talk, we present Banaszak and Kedlaya's algebraic version of the Sato-Tate conjecture, we describe the notion of Galois type of an abelian variety, and we establish the dictionary between Galois types and Sato-Tate groups of abelian surfaces defined over number fields.
generalized Sato-Tate conjecture - Sato-Tate group - equidistribution - Sato-Tate axioms - Galois type - Abelian surfaces - endomorphism algebra - Frobenius distributions[-]

This series of three talks is the first part of an introductory course on the generalized Sato-Tate conjecture, made in collaboration with Andrew V. Sutherland at the Winter School "Frobenius distributions on curves", celebrated in Luminy in February 2014. In the first talk, some general background following Serre's works is introduced: equidistribution and its connexion to L-functions, the Sato-Tate group and the Sato-Tate conjecture. In the second talk, we present the Sato-Tate axiomatic, which leads us to some Lie group theoretic classification results. The last part of the talk is devoted to illustrate the methods involved in the proof of this kind of results by considering a concrete example. In the third and final talk, we present Banaszak and Kedlaya's algebraic version of the Sato-Tate conjecture, we describe the notion of Galois type of an abelian variety, and we establish the dictionary between Galois types and Sato-Tate groups of abelian surfaces defined over number fields.
generalized Sato-Tate conjecture - Sato-Tate group - equidistribution - Sato-Tate axioms - Galois type - Abelian surfaces - endomorphism algebra - Frobenius distributions[-]

This series of three talks is the first part of an introductory course on the generalized Sato-Tate conjecture, made in collaboration with Andrew V. Sutherland at the Winter School "Frobenius distributions on curves", celebrated in Luminy in February 2014. In the first talk, some general background following Serre's works is introduced: equidistribution and its connexion to L-functions, the Sato-Tate group and the Sato-Tate conjecture. In the second talk, we present the Sato-Tate axiomatic, which leads us to some Lie group theoretic classification results. The last part of the talk is devoted to illustrate the methods involved in the proof of this kind of results by considering a concrete example. In the third and final talk, we present Banaszak and Kedlaya's algebraic version of the Sato-Tate conjecture, we describe the notion of Galois type of an abelian variety, and we establish the dictionary between Galois types and Sato-Tate groups of abelian surfaces defined over number fields.
generalized Sato-Tate conjecture - Sato-Tate group - equidistribution - Sato-Tate axioms - Galois type - Abelian surfaces - endomorphism algebra - Frobenius distributions[-]

It is classical that, for example, there is a simple abelian variety of dimension $4$ which is not the jacobian of any curve of genus $4$, and it is not hard to see that there is one defined over the field of all algebraic numbers $\overline{\bf Q}$. In $2012$ Chai and Oort asked if there is a simple abelian fourfold, defined over $\overline{\bf Q}$, which is not even isogenous to any jacobian. In the same year Tsimerman answered ''yes''. Recently Zannier and I have done this over the rationals $\bf Q$, and with ''yes, almost all''. In my talk I will explain ''almost all'' the concepts involved.[-]

I will discuss recent joint work with Sarah Zerbes in which we use Euler systems and reciprocity laws for GSp(4) to study the analytic rank 0 case of the Birch--Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for abelian surfaces. Via restriction of scalars, this also includes the BSD conjecture for analytic rank 0 elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields. Our main result is a conditional proof of the conjecture subject to an assumption about the local geometry of the GSp4 eigenvariety at non-regular-weight points. I will explain how this conjecture arises and some motivation for why it seems plausible that it should hold.[-]