Determinant bundles for Abelian schemes

To a symmetric, relatively ample line bundle on an Abelian scheme one can a ssociate a linear combination of the determinant bundle and the relative ca nonical bundle, which is a torsion element in the Picard group of the base. We improve the bound on the order of this element found by Faltings and Ch ai. In particular, we obtain an optimal bound when the degree of the line b undle d is odd and the set of residue characteristics of the base does not intersect the set of primes p dividing d, such that p = -1 mod(4) and p les s than or equal to 2g -1, where g is the relative dimension of the Abelian scheme. Also, we show that in some cases these torsion elements generate th e entire torsion subgroup in the Picard group of the corresponding moduli s tack.