Given an abelian variety $A$ of dimension $g$ over a number field $K$, and a prime $\ell $, the ${\ell }^{n} $-torsion points of $A$ give rise to a representation ${\rho }_{A, {\ell }^{n} } : \mathrm{Gal} ( \overline{K} / K)\rightarrow {\mathrm{GL} }_{2g} ( \mathbb{Z} / {\ell }^{n} \mathbb{Z} )$. In particular, we get a mod-$\ell $representation ${\rho }_{A, \ell } : \mathrm{Gal} ( \overline{K} / K)\rightarrow {\mathrm{GL} }_{2g} ({ \mathbb{F} }_{\ell } )$ and an $\ell $-adic representation ${\rho }_{A, {\ell }^{\infty } } : \mathrm{Gal} ( \overline{K} / K)\rightarrow {\mathrm{GL} }_{2g} ({ \mathbb{Z} }_{\ell } )$. In this paper, we describe the possible determinants of
subquotients of these two representations. These two lists turn out to be remarkably
similar.
Applying our results in dimension $g= 1$, we recover a generalized version of a theorem of Momose on isogeny
characters of elliptic curves over number fields, and obtain, conditionally on the
Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, a generalization of Mazur’s bound on rational
isogenies of prime degree to number fields.