The cohomological Kudla conjecture for unitary Shimura varieties

Abstract

We construct natural extensions of the Kudla--Millson generating series of cohomology classes of special cycles in compactified unitary Shimura varieties of signature $(n+1,1)$ and prove that they are holomorphic Hermitian modular forms. This proves the cohomological version of a conjecture of Kudla and Bruinier--Rosu--Zemel, in all codimensions up to the middle. We also develop the theory of Hermitian quasi-modular forms, with a particular focus on polynomial weighted theta functions, and prove that the generating series of Zariski closures of special cycles is a Hermitian quasi-modular form.