On the Curves Associated to Certain Rings of Automorphic Forms

In a 1987 paper, Gross introduced certain curves associated to a definite quaternion algebra B over Q; he then proved an analog of his result with Zagier for these curves. In Gross’ paper, the curves were defined in a somewhat ad hoc manner. In this article, we present an interpretation of these curves as projective varieties arising from graded rings of automorphic forms on B×, analogously to the construction in the Satake compactification. To define such graded rings, one needs to introduce a “multiplication” of automorphic forms that arises from the representation ring of B×. The resulting curves are unions of projective lines equipped with a collection of Hecke correspondences. They parametrize two-dimensional complex tori with quaternionic multiplication. In general, these complex tori are not abelian varieties; they are algebraic precisely when they correspond to CM points on these curves, and are thus isogenous to a product E × E, where E is an elliptic curve with complex multiplication. For these CM points one can make a relation between the action of the p-th Hecke operator and Frobenius at p, similar to the well-known congruence relation of Eichler and Shimura.