Abelian variety of CM-type

In mathematics, an abelian variety A defined over a field K is said to have CM-type if it has a large enough commutative subring in its endomorphism ring End(A). The terminology here is from complex multiplication theory, which was developed for elliptic curves in the nineteenth century. One of the major achievements in algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry of the twentieth century was to find the correct formulations of the corresponding theory for abelian varieties of dimension d > 1. The problem is at a deeper level of abstraction, because it is much harder to manipulate analytic functions of several complex variables.

The formal definition is that

the tensor product of End(A) with the rational number field Q, should contain a commutative subring of dimension 2d over Q. When d = 1 this can only be a quadratic field, and one recovers the cases where End(A) is an order in an imaginary quadratic field. For d > 1 there are comparable cases for CM-fields, the complex quadratic extensions of totally real fields. There are other cases that reflect that A may not be a simple abelian variety (it might be a cartesian product of elliptic curves, for example). Another name for abelian varieties of CM-type is abelian varieties with sufficiently many complex multiplications.