On supersingular loci of Shimura varieties for quaternionic unitary groups of degree 2

Abstract

We describe the structure of the supersingular locus of a Shimura variety for a quaternionic unitary similitude group of degree 2 over a ramified odd prime p if the level at p is given by a special maximal compact open subgroup. More precisely, we show that such a locus is purely 2-dimensional, and every irreducible component is birational to the Fermat surface. Furthermore, we have an estimation of the numbers of connected and irreducible components. To prove these assertions, we completely determine the structure of the underlying reduced scheme of the Rapoport–Zink space for the quaternionic unitary similitude group of degree 2, with a special parahoric level. We prove that such a scheme is purely 2-dimensional, and every irreducible component is isomorphic to the Fermat surface. We also determine its connected components, irreducible components and their intersection behaviors by means of the Bruhat–Tits building of \({{\,\mathrm{PGSp}\,}}_4({\mathbb {Q}}_p)\). In addition, we compute the intersection multiplicity of the GGP cycles associated to an embedding of the considering Rapoport–Zink space into the Rapoport–Zink space for the unramified \({{\,\mathrm{GU}\,}}_{2,2}\) with hyperspecial level for the minuscule case.