Viehweg hyperbolicity for Whitney equisingular families with Gorenstein rational singularities

Abstract

We prove the analogue of Viehweg's hyperbolicity conjecture for Whitney equisingular families of projective varieties with Gorenstein rational singularities whose geometric generic fiber has a good minimal model. Namely, for such families with maximal variation, the base spaces are of log general type. The main new ingredient is the use of intersection complexes as Hodge modules in the construction of logarithmic Higgs sheaves by Viehweg-Zuo and Popa-Schnell. This construction suggests an equisingular stratification of the moduli space of varieties of general type, with each stratum being hyperbolic, and our result is a first step in this direction.