Nondivisible cycles on products of very general Abelian varieties

Abstract

In this paper, we give a recipe for producing infinitely many nondivisible codimension 2 2 cycles on a product of two or more very general Abelian varieties. In the process, we introduce the notion of “field of definition” for cycles in the Chow group modulo (a power of) a prime. We show that for a quite general class of codimension 2 2 cycles, that we call “primitive cycles”, the field of definition is a ramified extension of the function field of a modular variety. This ramification allows us to use Nori’s isogeny method (modified by Totaro) to produce infinitely many nondivisible cycles. As an application, we prove the Chow group modulo a prime of a product of three or more very general elliptic curves is infinite, generalizing work of Schoen.