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In this paper, we survey some Galois-theoretic techniques for studying torsion points on curves. In particular, we give new proofs of some results of A. Tamagawa and the present authors for studying torsion points on curves with “ordinary good” or “ordinary semistable” reduction at a given prime. We also give new proofs of : (1) the Manin-Mumford conjecture : there are only finitely many torsion points lying on a curve of genus at least $2$ embedded in its jacobian by an Albanese map; and (2) the...

Given a rational function $\varphi \left(T\right)$ on ${\mathbb{P}}^1$ of degree at least 2 with coefficients in a number field $k$, we show that for each place $v$ of $k$, there is a unique probability measure ${\mu }_{\varphi ,v}$ on the Berkovich space ${\mathbb{P}}_{\mathrm{Berk},\mathrm{v}}^1/{ℂ}_v$ such that if $\left\{z_n\right\}$ is a sequence of points in ${\mathbb{P}}^1\left(\overline{k}\right)$ whose $\varphi$-canonical heights tend to zero, then the $z_n$’s and their $\mathrm{Gal}(\overline{k}/k)$-conjugates are equidistributed with respect to ${\mu }_{\varphi ,v}$. The proof uses a polynomial lift $F(x,y)=(F_1(x,y),F_2(x,y))$ of $\varphi$ to construct a two-variable Arakelov-Green’s function $g_{\varphi ,v}(x,y)$ for each $v$. The measure ${\mu }_{\varphi ,v}$ is obtained by...