Hyperbolicity of coarse moduli spaces and isotriviality for certain families

Abstract

In this paper, we prove the Kobayashi hyperbolicity of the coarse moduli spaces of canonically polarized or polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds in the sense of complex $V$-spaces (a generalization of complex $V$-manifolds in the sense of Satake). As an application, we prove the following hyperbolic version of Campana's isotriviality conjecture: for the smooth family of canonically polarized or polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds, when the Kobayashi pseudo-distance of the base vanishes identically, the family must be isotrivial, that is, any two fibers are isomorphic. We also prove that for the smooth projective family of polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds, its variation of the family is less than or equal to the essential dimension of the base.