Towards a unified theory of canonical heights on abelian varieties

p-adic heights have been a rich source of explicit functions vanishing on rational points on a curve. In this talk, we will outline a new construction of canonical p-adic heights on abelian varieties from p-adic adelic metrics, using p-adic Arakelov theory developed by Besser. This construction closely mirrors Zhang’s construction of canonical real valued heights from real-valued adelic metrics. We will use this new construction to give direct explanations (avoiding p-adic Hodge theory) of the key properties of height pairings needed for the quadratic Chabauty method for rational points. This is joint work with Amnon Besser and Steffen Mueller.