Lower bounds for the Smith-Thom deficiency of Hilbert squares

We establish lower bounds for the Smith–Thom deficiency of the Hilbert square of a maximal nonsingular real projective variety. These bounds recover the known surface case and provide new obstructions to Smith-Thom maximality in every dimension at least two. As applications, we prove that the Hilbert square of any real abelian variety of dimension at least two is not Smith-Thom maximal. We further show that the deficiencies of the Hilbert squares of maximal real abelian varieties grow exponentially with the dimension. We also obtain nonmaximality results for the Hilbert squares of certain Cartesian products.