Search for: All records

Abstract We study the intersection of the Torelli locus with the Newton polygon stratification of the modulo $p$ reduction of certain Shimura varieties. We develop a clutching method to show that the intersection of the open Torelli locus with some Newton polygon strata is non-empty. This allows us to give a positive answer, under some compatibility conditions, to a question of Oort about smooth curves in characteristic $p$ whose Newton polygons are an amalgamate sum. As an application, we produce infinitely many new examples of Newton polygons that occur for smooth curves that are cyclic covers of the projective line. Most of these arise in inductive systems that demonstrate unlikely intersections of the open Torelli locus with the Newton polygon stratification in Siegel modular varieties. In addition, for the 20 special Shimura varieties found in Moonen’s work, we prove that all Newton polygon strata intersect the open Torelli locus (if $p>>0$ in the supersingular cases). 

In the 1970's, Serre exploited congruences between q-expansion coefficients of Eisenstein series to produce p-adic families of Eisenstein series and, in turn, p-adic zeta functions. Partly through integration with more recent machinery, including Katz's approach to p-adic differential operators, his strategy has influenced four decades of developments. Prior papers employing Katz's and Serre's ideas exploiting differential operators and congruences to produce families of automorphic forms rely crucially on q-expansions of automorphic forms. The overarching goal of the present paper is to adapt the strategy to automorphic forms on unitary groups, which lack q-expansions when the signature is of the form (a,b), a≠b. In particular, this paper completely removes the restrictions on the signature present in prior work. As intermediate steps, we achieve two key objectives. First, partly by carefully analyzing the action of the Young symmetrizer on Serre-Tate expansions, we explicitly describe the action of differential operators on the Serre-Tate expansions of automorphic forms on unitary groups of arbitrary signature. As a direct consequence, for each unitary group, we obtain congruences and families analogous to those studied by Katz and Serre. Second, via a novel lifting argument, we construct a p-adic measure taking values in the space of p-adic automorphic forms on unitary groups of any prescribed signature. We relate the values of this measure to an explicit p-adic family of Eisenstein series. One application of our results is to the recently completed construction of p-adic L-functions for unitary groups by the first named author, Harris, Li, and Skinner. 

In the 1970's, Serre exploited congruences between q-expansion coefficients of Eisenstein series to produce p-adic families of Eisenstein series and, in turn, p-adic zeta functions. Partly through integration with more recent machinery, including Katz's approach to p-adic differential operators, his strategy has influenced four decades of developments. Prior papers employing Katz's and Serre's ideas exploiting differential operators and congruences to produce families of automorphic forms rely crucially on q-expansions of automorphic forms. The overarching goal of the present paper is to adapt the strategy to automorphic forms on unitary groups, which lack q-expansions when the signature is of the form (a,b), a≠b. In particular, this paper completely removes the restrictions on the signature present in prior work. As intermediate steps, we achieve two key objectives. First, partly by carefully analyzing the action of the Young symmetrizer on Serre-Tate expansions, we explicitly describe the action of differential operators on the Serre-Tate expansions of automorphic forms on unitary groups of arbitrary signature. As a direct consequence, for each unitary group, we obtain congruences and families analogous to those studied by Katz and Serre. Second, via a novel lifting argument, we construct a p-adic measure taking values in the space of p-adic automorphic forms on unitary groups of any prescribed signature. We relate the values of this measure to an explicit p-adic family of Eisenstein series. One application of our results is to the recently completed construction of p-adic L-functions for unitary groups by the first named author, Harris, Li, and Skinner.