The main result of this paper concerns the positivity of the Hodge bundles of abelian varieties over global function fields. As applications, we obtain some partial results on the Tate–Shafarevich group and the Tate conjecture of surfaces over finite fields.

Let ${\mathcal{X}}$ be a regular variety, flat and proper over a complete regular curve over a finite field such that the generic fiber $X$ is smooth and geometrically connected. We prove that the Brauer group of ${\mathcal{X}}$ is finite if and only Tate’s conjecture for divisors on $X$ holds and the Tate–Shafarevich group of the Albanese variety of $X$ is finite, generalizing a theorem of Artin and Grothendieck for surfaces to arbitrary relative dimension. We also give a formula relating the orders of the group under the assumption that they are finite, generalizing the known formula for a surface.

We give a formula relating the order of the Brauer group of a surface fibered over a curve over a finite field to the order of the Tate–Shafarevich group of the Jacobian of the generic fiber. The formula implies that the Brauer group of a smooth and proper surface over a finite field is a square if it is finite.

We study the growth of $\unicode[STIX]{x0428}$ and $p^{\infty }$-Selmer groups for isogenous abelian varieties in towers of number fields, with an emphasis on elliptic curves. The growth types are usually exponential, as in the ‘positive ${\it\mu}$-invariant’ setting in the Iwasawa theory of elliptic curves. The towers we consider are $p$-adic and $l$-adic Lie extensions for $l\neq p$, in particular cyclotomic and other $\mathbb{Z}_{l}$-extensions.

For an abelian variety $A$ over a number field $k$ we discuss the maximal divisible subgroup of ${\mathrm{H} }^{1} (k, A)$ and its intersection with the subgroup Ш$(A/ k)$. The results are most complete for elliptic curves over $ \mathbb{Q} $.

Let E/ℚ be an elliptic curve and p a prime of supersingular reduction for E. Denote by the anticyclotomic ℤp-extension of an imaginary quadratic field K which satisfies the Heegner hypothesis. Assuming that p splits in K/ℚ, we prove that has trivial Λ-corank and, in the process, also show that and both have Λ-corank two.