The singularities and Kodaira dimension of unitary Shimura varieties

Abstract

The Kodaira dimension of Shimura varieties has been studied by many people. Kondo and Gritsenko-Hulek-Sankaran studied the singularities of orthogonal Shimura varieties related to the moduli spaces of polarized K3 surfaces. They proved that they have canonical singularities and are of general type if the polarization degree is sufficiently large. In this paper, we work on similar problems for unitary Shimura varieties. We show that they have canonical singularities if $n > 4$. As an application, we show that certain unitary Shimura varieties associated with Hermitian forms over the rings of integers of $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-1})$, $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-3})$ are of general type. We use modular forms of low weight vanishing on ramification divisors, which are the restrictions of the quasi-pullbacks of the Borcherds form $\Phi_{12}$.