We introduce a ‘limiting Frobenius structure’ attached to any degeneration of projective varieties over a finite field of characteristic p which satisfies a p-adic lifting assumption. Our limiting Frobenius structure is shown to be effectively computable in an appropriate sense for a degeneration of projective hypersurfaces. We conjecture that the limiting Frobenius structure relates to the rigid cohomology of a semistable limit of the degeneration through an analogue of the Clemens–Schmidt exact sequence. Our construction is illustrated, and conjecture supported, by a selection of explicit examples.

Using properties of the Frobenius eigenvalues, we show that, in a precise sense, ‘most’ isomorphism classes of (principally polarized) simple abelian varieties over a finite field are characterized, up to isogeny, by the sequence of their division fields, and we show a similar result for ‘most’ isogeny classes. Some global cases are also treated.

We compute the Chow group of 0-cycles on a rational surface defined over a finite extension K of the field $\mathbb{Q}_p$ of p-adic numbers (p a prime) when it is split by an unramified extension of K. We use intersection theory to define a specialisation map so we need to assume that the surface admits a regular proper integral model. A family of examples is worked out to illustrate the method.