The torsion point count in higher dimension

Question

It is an easy consequence of the Serre open image theorem that for the torsion point count on elliptic curves, the following possibilities arise.

1. If $E/\bar{\mathbb{Q}}$ is an elliptic curve without CM, then the number of torsion points $x \in E$ with $[\mathbb{Q}(x):\mathbb{Q}] \leq d$ is $\asymp d^{3/2}$ as $d \to \infty$.

2. If $E/\bar{\mathbb{Q}}$ is an elliptic curve with CM, then this number is $\asymp d^2$ as $d \to \infty$.

This appears on page 44 of Serre's book, Lectures on Mordell-Weil. As stated there, it is easy to show that, for a $g$-dimensional abelian variety, the corresponding count is bounded by $\leq O(d^{N})$ with $N = N(g) < \infty$.

Should we expect, for $g$-dimensional abelian varieties, the count to be always asymptotic to $d^{\alpha}$ for a finite set of exponents $\alpha$ depending on $g$? Are there any clues as to the spectrum of those exponents?

Second, I wanted to ask about any results on the uniform torsion count problem giving bounds that are uniform in $E$ but still polynomial in $d$. (Thus I do not ask about Merel's uniform boundedness theorem and its relatives). For example, restricting to $g$-dimensional abelian varieties over $\bar{\mathbb{Z}}$ (that is, with integral moduli, or with everywhere potentially good reduction), or at least to the abelian schemes over the spectra of rings of integers of number fields of bounded degree, it is clear a priori that there is a uniform exponential bound in $d$. Should we expect this uniform bound to be strengthened to a polynomial bound, or even (for elliptic curves) to $Cd^{2+\epsilon}$? What about the generalization where we count the small algebraic points, say those of (canonical) height $< 1/d$?

Answer 1

As far as I know, we expect that the image of the Galois group in $GL_{2g}(\mathbb A_\mathbb Q)$ is open in $G(\mathbb A_\mathbb Q)$ for $G$ the monodromy group of the Galois representation (which is expected to be independent of $l$. Then the asymptotic for this function clearly depends only on the connected component of the identity of this monodromy group, which is expected to be the Mumford-Tate group.

(1) For each possible Mumford-Tate group $G$, is the number of points in $(\mathbb Q/\mathbb Z)^{2g}$ fixed by an index $d$ subgroup in $G(\mathbb A_\mathbb Q)$ asymptotic to $d^\alpha$ for some $\alpha$?

(2) Are there finitely many possible Mumford-Tate groups?

The first one is not too hard to see. The index of the subgroup fixing an $n$-torsion point is the size of the orbit of that point, which is approximately the number of $\mathbb Z/n$ points of some algebraic variety, which is approximately polynomial in $n$. Then we can sum over all points $n$-torsion for $n\leq N$, another polynomial. If there are different sorts of orbits of different dimensions, then we can just sum over the different sorts of orbits and still get something of the form $d^\alpha$ up to some constant error.

The second one is clear since the Mumford-Tate group should be reductive, and thus there is a nice classification.