Here we focus on the geometry of , the compactification of the universal Picard variety constructed by L. Caporaso. In particular, we show that the moduli space of spin curves constructed by M. Cornalba naturally injects into and we give generators and relations of the rational Picard group of , extending previous work by A. Kouvidakis.
In the current paper we show that the dimension of a family of irreducible reduced curves in a given ample linear system on a toric surface over an algebraically closed field is bounded from above by , where denotes a general curve in the family. This result generalizes a famous theorem of Zariski to the case of positive characteristic. We also explore new phenomena that occur in positive characteristic: We show that the equality does not imply the nodality of even if belongs to the...