LAUSR

Abstract The characteristic polynomials of abelian varieties over the finite field F q with q = p n elements have a lot of arithmetic and geometric information. They have been explicitly described for abelian varieties up to dimension 4, but little is known in higher dimension. In this paper, among other things, we obtain the following three results on the characteristic polynomial of abelian varieties. First, we prove a relation between n and e, where e is a certain multiplicity associated with a simple abelian variety of arbitrary dimension over F q . Second, we explicitly describe the characteristic polynomials of simple abelian varieties of arbitrary dimension g, when e = g . Finally, we explicitly describe the coefficients of characteristic polynomials of abelian varieties of dimension 5 over F q .