Computing class polynomials for abelian surfaces

Abstract: We describe a quasi-linear algorithm for computing Igusa class polynomials of Jacobians of genus 2 curves via complex floating-point approximations of their roots. After providing an explicit treatment of the computations in quartic CM fields and their Galois closures, we pursue an approach due to Dupont for evaluating $\theta$- constants in quasi-linear time using Newton iterations on the Borchardt mean. We report on experiments with our implementation and present an example with class number 17608.