Uniform boundedness of <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-primary torsion of abelian schemes

Let k be a field finitely generated over ℚ and p a prime. The torsion conjecture (resp. p-primary torsion conjecture) for abelian varieties over k predicts that the k-rational torsion (resp. the p-primary k-rational torsion) of a d-dimensional abelian variety A over k should be bounded only in terms of k and d. These conjectures are only known for d=1. The p-primary case was proved by Y. Manin, in 1969; the general case was completed by L. Merel, in 1996, after a series of contributions by B. Mazur, S. Kamienny and others. Due to the fact that moduli of elliptic curves are 1-dimensional, the d=1 case of the torsion conjecture (resp. p-primary torsion conjecture) is closely related to the following. For any k-curve S and elliptic scheme E→S, the k-rational torsion (resp. the p-primary k-rational torsion) is uniformly bounded in the fibres E _s , s∈S(k). In this paper, we extend this result in the p-primary case to arbitrary abelian schemes over curves.