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[-]

Consider an ordinary isogeny class of elliptic curves over a finite, prime field. Inspired by a random matrix heuristic (which is so strong it's false), Gekeler defines a local factor for each rational prime. Using the analytic class number formula, he shows that the associated infinite product computes the size of the isogeny class.
I'll explain a transparent proof of this formula; it turns out that this product actually computes an adelic orbital integral which visibly counts the desired cardinality. Moreover, the new perspective allows a natural generalization to higher-dimensional abelian varieties. This is joint work with Julia Gordon and S. Ali Altug.[-]

Curves over finite fields of large genus with many rational points have been of interest for both theoretical reasons and for applications. In the past, various methods have been employed for the construction of such curves. One such method is by means of explicit recursive equations and will be the emphasis of this talk.The first explicit examples were found by Garcia–Stichtenoth over quadratic finite fields in 1995. Afterwards followed the discovery of good towers over cubic finite fields and finally all nonprime finite fields in 2013 (B.–Beelen–Garcia–Stichtenoth). The recursive nature of these towers makes them very special and in fact all good examples have been shown to have a modular interpretation of some sort. The questions of finding good recursive towers over prime fields resisted all attempts for several decades and lead to the common belief that such towers might not exist. In this talk I will try to give an overview of the landscape of explicit recursive towers and present a recently discovered tower over all finite fields including prime fields, except $F_{2}$ and $F_{3}$.
This is joint work with Christophe Ritzenthaler.[-]

For a long time people have been interested in finding and constructing curves over finite fields with many points. For genus 1 and genus 2 curves, we know how to construct curves over any finite field of defect less than 1 or 3 (respectively), i.e. with a number of points at distance at most 1 or 3 to the upper bound given by the Hasse-Weil-Serre bound. The case of genus 3 is still open after more than 40 years of research. In this talk I will take a different approach based on the random matrix theory of Katz-Sarnak, that describe the distribution of the number of points, to prove the existence, for all $\epsilon>0$, of curves of genus $g$ over $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ with more than $1+q+(2 g-\epsilon) \sqrt{q}$ points for $q$ big enough. I will also discuss some explicit constructions as well as some details about the asymmetric of the distribution of the trace of the Frobenius for curves of genus 3 .This is a joint work with J. Bergström, E. Howe and C. Ritzenthaler.[-]