Slopes of integral lattices

We use the dyadic trace to define the concept of slope for integral lattices. We present an introduction to the theory of the slope invariant. The main theorem states that a Siegel modular cusp form f of slope strictly less than the slope of an integral lattice with Gram matrix s satisfies f(sτ)=0 for all τ in the upper half plane. We compute the dyadic trace and the slope of each root lattice and we give applications to Siegel modular cusp forms.