Foliations on unitary Shimura varieties in positive characteristic

Abstract

When$p$is inert in the quadratic imaginary field$E$and$m<n$, unitary Shimura varieties of signature$(n,m)$and a hyperspecial level subgroup at$p$, carry a naturalfoliationof height 1 and rank$m^{2}$in the tangent bundle of their special fiber$S$. We study this foliation and show that it acquires singularities at deep Ekedahl–Oort strata, but that these singularities are resolved if we pass to a natural smooth moduli problem$S^{\sharp }$, a successive blow-up of$S$. Over the ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$-)ordinary locus we relate the foliation to Moonen’s generalized Serre–Tate coordinates. We study the quotient of$S^{\sharp }$by the foliation, and identify it as the Zariski closure of the ordinary-étale locus in the special fiber$S_{0}(p)$of a certain Shimura variety with parahoric level structure at$p$. As a result, we get that this ‘horizontal component’ of$S_{0}(p)$, as well as its multiplicative counterpart, are non-singular (formerly they were only known to be normal and Cohen–Macaulay). We study two kinds of integral manifolds of the foliation: unitary Shimura subvarieties of signature$(m,m)$, and a certain Ekedahl–Oort stratum that we denote$S_{\text{fol}}$. We conjecture that these are the only integral submanifolds.