Hyperelliptic curves on $K3$ surfaces

We study hyperelliptic curves on $K3$ surfaces. We show that any number of general points on a $K3$ surface of Picard rank one can be connected by a hyperelliptic curve. As a by-product we recover the Beauville–Voisin decomposition of the small diagonal, together with some new bounds on its torsion order in the integral Chow group. On the arithmetic side, given a $K3$ surface $X$ of geometric Picard rank one defined over a number field $k$, we show that there exists a finite extension $k\subset k^{\mathrm{\prime }}$ such that quadratic points are dense in $X_{k^{\mathrm{\prime }}}$, extending a theorem of Corvaja–Zucconi to $K3$ surfaces of arbitrary degree.