Slopes of Siegel cusp forms and geometry of compactified Kuga varieties

Abstract

We study the Kodaira dimension of the compactified n-fold Kuga variety over the moduli space of principally polarised abelian g-folds. We construct a suitable compactification, which we call a Namikawa compactification, and show that in most cases it has canonical singularities. We then use results about the slope of Siegel modular forms to determine the Kodaira dimension for all g>1 and n>0.