GREEN FORMS and the ARITHMETIC SIEGEL-WEIL FORMULA Contents 1. Introduction 2 1.1. Main Results 2 1.2. Notation and Conventions
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GREEN FORMS AND THE ARITHMETIC SIEGEL-WEIL FORMULA LUIS E. GARCIA AND SIDDARTH SANKARAN Abstract. We construct natural Green forms for special cycles in orthogonal and unitary Shimura varieties, in all codimensions, and, for compact Shimura varieties of type O(p; 2) and U(p; 1), we show that the resulting local archimedean height pairings are related to special values of derivatives of Siegel Eisentein series. A conjecture put forward by Kudla relates these derivatives to arithmetic intersections of special cycles, and our results settle the part of his conjecture involving local archimedean heights. Contents 1. Introduction2 1.1. Main results2 1.2. Notation and conventions6 1.3. Acknowledgments7 2. Green forms on hermitian symmetric domains7 2.1. Superconnections and characteristic forms of Koszul complexes8 2.2. Hermitian symmetric domains of orthogonal and unitary groups 12 2.3. Explicit formulas for O(p; 2) and U(p; 1) 14 2.4. Basic properties of the forms ' and ν 15 2.5. Behaviour under the Weil representation 18 2.6. Green forms 21 2.7. Star products 25 3. Archimedean heights and derivatives of Whittaker functionals 27 3.1. Degenerate principal series of Mp2r(R) 28 3.2. Degenerate principal series of U(r; r) 30 3.3. Whittaker functionals 33 3.4. The integral of go 40 4. Green forms for special cycles on Shimura varieties 45 4.1. Orthogonal Shimura varieties 45 4.2. Special cycles 47 4.3. Green forms for special cycles 47 4.4. Unitary Shimura varieties 51 4.5. Star products on XK 54 5. Local archimedean heights and derivatives of Siegel Eisenstein series 55 5.1. Siegel Eisenstein series and the Siegel-Weil formula 56 5.2. Fourier coefficients of scalar weight Eisenstein series 59 1 GREEN FORMS AND THE ARITHMETIC SIEGEL-WEIL FORMULA 2 5.3. Archimedean height pairings 75 5.4. Classes in arithmetic Chow groups 80 5.5. Kudla's arithmetic height conjecture 81 References 83 1. Introduction The Arakelov theory of Shimura varieties has been intensively studied since, about twenty years ago, Kudla [23] launched a program relating families of special cycles in their arithmetic Chow groups with derivatives of Eisenstein series and Rankin-Selberg L- functions. This paper is a contribution to the archimedean aspects of this theory. Building upon previous work of the first author [11], we use Quillen's formalism of superconnections [39] as developed by Bismut-Gillet-Soul´e[2,3] to construct natural Green forms for special cycles, in all codimensions, on orthogonal and unitary Shimura varieties. We show that these forms have good functorial properties and are compatible with star products. Furthermore, for compact Shimura varieties of type GSpin(p; 2) or U(p; 1), we compute the corresponding local archimedean heights of special cyles explicitly. These results provide compelling evidence for Kudla's conjectural identity, termed the arithmetic Siegel-Weil formula, between special derivatives of Eisenstein series and gen- erating series of arithmetic heights of special cycles. More precisely, we show that the non-holomorphic terms on both sides are equal for these Shimura varieties. Our methods combine Quillen's extension of Chern-Weil theory with the theory of the theta correspondence. This allows us to use representation theoretic arguments and the Siegel-Weil formula when computing archimedean local heights. In this way, we avoid the highly involved computations that feature in prior work, and give a conceptual explanation for the equality of non-holomorphic terms in Kudla's conjectural identities. 1.1. Main results. The remainder of the introduction outlines our results in more detail. Throughout the paper, we treat GSpin(p; 2) and U(p; q) Shimura varieties in parallel; these are referred to as the orthogonal and unitary cases, respectively. Let F denote a totally real field of degree [F : Q] = d and let E be a CM extension of F equipped with a fixed CM type. Suppose that V is a quadratic space over F in the orthogonal case (resp. a Hermitian space over E in the unitary case). We assume that there is one archimedean place σ1 such that Vσ1 satisfies the signature condition ( (p; 2) with p > 0 orthogonal case, signature(Vσ1 ) = (1.1.1) (p; q) with p; q > 0 unitary case; and V is positive definite at all other archimedean places. Let ( Res GSpin( ); orthogonal case, H = F=Q V (1.1.2) ResF=Q U(V); unitary case; GREEN FORMS AND THE ARITHMETIC SIEGEL-WEIL FORMULA 3 and D be the hermitian symmetric domain attached to H(R); concretely, D parametrizes oriented negative-definite real planes (resp. negative definite complex q-dimensional sub- spaces) in Vσ1 in the orthogonal (resp. unitary) case. For a fixed compact open subgroup K ⊂ H(Af ), let XV;K be the corresponding Shimura variety, which has a canonical model over σ1(F ) (resp. σ1(E)). Then XV;K is a finite disjoint union a XV;K = ΓnD (1.1.3) of quotients of D by certain arithmetic subgroups Γ ⊂ H(Q). Let XK denote the variety obtained by viewing the canonical model of XV;K as a variety over Spec(Q). The complex points a XK (C) = XV[k];K (1.1.4) are a finite disjoint union of Shimura varieties attached to V[1] := V and its nearby spaces V[k] (see Section4). The variety XK is equipped with a family of rational special cycles fZ(T;'f )g; (1.1.5) as defined by Kudla [22], that are parametrized by pairs (T;'f ) consisting of a matrix r K T 2 Symr(F ) (resp. T 2 Herr(E)) and a K-invariant Schwartz function 'f 2 S(V(Af ) ) . These cycles generalize the construction of Heegner points on modular curves and Hirzebruch- Zagier cycles on Hilbert modular surfaces. The irreducible components of the cycle Z(T;'f ) on XV;K (say) admit a complex uni- formization by certain complex submanifolds Dv of D defined as follows: for a collection r of vectors v = (v1; : : : ; vr) 2 V satisfying : 1 T (v) = 2 Q(vi; vj) i;j=1;:::;r = T; (1.1.6) let Dv := fz 2 D j z ? vi for all i = 1; : : : ; rg; (1.1.7) so that Dv, if non-empty, is a hermitian symmetric subdomain of D of codimensionr ~ := rk(T ) in the orthogonal case (resp.r ~ := q · rk(T ) in the unitary case). As a first step towards defining a Green current for Z(T;'f ), we construct a current go(v) on D satisfying the equation c o r−rk(T ) o dd g (v) + δDv ^ ΩE_ = ['KM(v)]: (1.1.8) _ Here δDv is the current defined by integration along Dv and ΩE is the top Chern form o of the dual of the tautological bundle E, see Section 2.2 below; the form 'KM(v) := 2πtr(T (v)) 1 r;~ r~ e 'KM(v) is, up to a normalizing factor, the Schwartz form 'KM(v) 2 A (D) introduced by Kudla and Millson [27]. In recent work [11], the first author introduced a superconnection rv on D and showed o that the component of degree (~r; r~) of the corresponding Chern form agrees with 'KM(v). 1 This means that 'KM(v) and all its derivatives are of exponential decay in v. GREEN FORMS AND THE ARITHMETIC SIEGEL-WEIL FORMULA 4 This allows us to apply the general results of [2] to obtain an explicit natural form νo(v) satisfying the transgression formula p d p ddc νo( t v) = −t 'o ( t v); t 2 : (1.1.9) dt KM R>0 o o Moreover, the forms ν (tv) and ' (tv) are of exponential decay in t on DnDv. To define go(v), assume first that T is a non-degenerate matrix (so that r = rk(T )) and consider the integral Z 1 p dt go(v) := νo( tv) ; (1.1.10) 1 t o initially defined on DnDv. The estimates in [3] show that g (v) is smooth on DnDv, locally integrable on D, and satisfies (1.1.8), which in this case reduces to Green's equation; in o other words, g (v) is a Green form for Dv, in the terminology of [6, x1.1]. When T is degenerate, the expression (1.1.10) is not locally integrable on D in general. We will circumvent this problem by regularizing the integral and obtain a current go(v) satisfying (1.1.8) for every v, see Section 2.6.1. Returning to the special cycles Z(T;'f ), we define currents g(T; y;'f ) on XK (C) as weighted sums of go(v) over vectors v satisfying T (v) = T ; these currents also depend on a parameter y 2 Symr(F ⊗Q R)0 or y 2 Herr(E ⊗Q R)0 in the orthogonal or unitary cases, respectively. Theorem 1.1.1. The current g(T; y;'f ) satisfies ddcg(T; y;' ) + δ ^ Ωr−rk(T ) = !(T; y;' ); (1.1.11) f Z(T;'f )(C) E_ f where !(T; y;'f ) is the T 'th coefficient in the q-expansion of the theta function attached to 'KM ⊗ 'f . Moreover, if T1 and T2 are non-degenerate and Z(T1;'1) and Z(T2;'2) intersect prop- erly, then X y1 c g(T1; y1;'1) ∗ g(T2; y2;'2) ≡ g (T; ( y2 ) ;'1 ⊗ '2) (mod im d + im d ): T =( T1 ∗ ) ∗ T2 Note that our construction is valid for all T ; for example, when V is anisotropic we obtain _ ∗ r−1 g(0; y;'f )jX ( ) = −'f (0) log(det σk(y)) · crk(E)−1(E ; r) ^ Ω _ (1.1.12) K,σk C E for each real embedding σk of F .