Paramodular Abelian Varieties of Odd Conductor

A precise and testable modularity conjecture for rational abelian surfaces A with trivial endomorphisms, End_Q A = Z, is presented. It is consistent with our examples, our non-existence results and recent work of C. Poor and D. S. Yuen on weight 2 Siegel paramodular forms. We obtain fairly precise information on ell-division fields of semistable abelian varieties A, mainly when A[ell] is reducible, by considering extension problems for groups schemes of small rank. Our general results imply, for instance, that the least prime conductor of an abelian surface is 277.