Moduli spaces of abstract and embedded Kummer varieties

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the construction of two moduli stacks of Kummer varieties. The first one is the stack [Formula: see text] of abstract Kummer varieties and the second one is the stack [Formula: see text] of embedded Kummer varieties. We will prove that [Formula: see text] is a Deligne-Mumford stack and its coarse moduli space is isomorphic to [Formula: see text], the coarse moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension [Formula: see text]. On the other hand, we give a modular family [Formula: see text] of embedded Kummer varieties embedded in [Formula: see text], meaning that every geometric fiber of this family is an embedded Kummer variety and every isomorphic class of such varieties appears at least once as the class of a fiber. As a consequence, we construct the coarse moduli space [Formula: see text] of embedded Kummer surfaces and prove that it is obtained from [Formula: see text] by contracting the locus swept by a particular linear equivalence class of curves. We conjecture that this is a general fact: [Formula: see text] could be obtained from [Formula: see text] via a contraction for all [Formula: see text].