The universal abelian variety over A_5

Abstract

We establish a structure result for the universal abelian variety over the moduli space A_5, in terms of discriminant curves of conic bundles over a del Pezzo surface. In particular, this gives a very simple unirational parametrization of the boundary divisor of the moduli space A_6 of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension 6. Using this we derive a lower bound on the slope of all effective divisors on A_6.