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Abstract

Severi varieties and Brill-Noether theory of curves on K3 surfaces are well understood. Yet, quite little is known for curves on abelian surfaces. Given a general abelian surface $S$ with polarization $L$ of type $(1,n)$, we prove
nonemptiness and regularity of the Severi variety parametrizing $\delta$-nodal curves in the linear system $|L|$ for $0\leq \delta\leq n-1=p-2$ (here $p$ is the arithmetic genus of any curve in $|L|$). We also show that a general genus $g$ curve having as nodal model a hyperplane section of some $(1,n)$-polarized
abelian surface admits only finitely many such models up to translation; moreover, any such model lies on finitely many $(1,n)$-polarized abelian surfaces. Under certain assumptions, a conjecture of Dedieu and Sernesi is proved concerning the possibility of deforming a genus $g$ curve in $S$ equigenerically to a nodal curve. The rest of the paper deals with the
Brill-Noether theory of curves in $|L|$. It turns out that a general curve in $|L|$ is Brill-Noether general. However, as soon as the Brill-Noether number is negative and some other inequalities are satisfied, the locus $|L|^r_d$ of smooth curves in $|L|$ possessing a $g^r_d$ is nonempty and has a component of the expected dimension. As an application, we obtain the existence of a component of the Brill-Noether locus $\mathcal{M}^r_{p,d}$ having the expected codimension in the moduli space of curves $\mathcal{M}_p$. For $r=1$, the results are generalized to nodal curves.