Singularities of the moduli space of level curves

Abstract

We describe the singular locus of the compactification of the moduli space $R_{g,l}$ of curves of genus $g$ paired with an $l$-torsion point in their Jacobian. Generalising previous work for $l\le 2$, we also describe the sublocus of noncanonical singularities for any positive integer $l$. For $g\ge 4$ and $l=3,4, 6$, this allows us to provide a lifting result on pluricanonical forms playing an essential role in the computation of the Kodaira dimension of $R_{g,l}$: for those values of $l$, every pluricanonical form on the smooth locus of the moduli space extends to a desingularisation of the compactified moduli space.