On a conjecture of Buium and Poonen

Given a correspondence between a modular curve $S$ and an elliptic curve $A$, we prove that the intersection of any finite-rank subgroup of $A$ with the set of points on $A$ corresponding to an isogeny class on $S$ is finite. The question was proposed by A. Buium and B. Poonen in 2009. We follow the strategy proposed by the authors, using a result about the equidistribution of Hecke points on Shimura varieties and Serre’s open image theorem. The result is an instance of the Zilber-Pink conjecture.