The basepoint-freeness threshold and syzygies of abelian varieties

We show how a natural constant introduced by Jiang and Pareschi for a polarized abelian variety encodes information about the syzygies of the section ring of the polarization. As a particular case this gives a quick and characteristic-free proof of Lazarsfeld’s conjecture on syzygies of abelian varieties, originally proved by Pareschi in characteristic zero.