The basic locus of the unitary Shimura variety with parahoric level structure, and special cycles

Abstract

In this paper, we study the basic locus in the fiber at $p$ of a certain unitary Shimura variety with a certain parahoric level structure. The basic locus $\widehat{\mathcal{M}^{ss}}$ is uniformized by a formal scheme $\mathcal{N}$ which is called Rapoport-Zink space. We show that the irreducible components of the induced reduced subscheme $\mathcal{N}_{red}$ of $\mathcal{N}$ are Deligne-Lusztig varieties and their intersection behavior is controlled by a certain Bruhat-Tits building. Also, we define special cycles in $\mathcal{N}$ and study their intersection multiplicities.