The fibers of the ramified Prym map

Abstract

We study the ramified Prym map $\mathcal P_{g,r} \longrightarrow \mathcal A_{g-1+\frac r2}^{\delta}$ which assigns to a ramified double cover of a smooth irreducible curve of genus $g$ ramified in $r$ points the Prym variety of the covering. We focus on the six cases where the dimension of the source is strictly greater than the dimension of the target giving a geometric description of the generic fibre. We also give an explicit example of a totally geodesic curve which is an irreducible component of a fibre of the Prym map ${\mathcal P}_{1,2}$.