Oort's conjecture for split unitary Shimura varieties

Abstract

We prove that generically on the basic stratum of split unitary Shimura varieties, the universal abelian variety with endomorphism structure and polarization has minimal automorphism group in a precise sense, except for a few degenerate cases. This is a direct analogue of Oort's conjecture on automorphisms of supersingular abelian varieties. On the way, we explicitly compute the generic automorphism group of the universal $p$-divisible group in a given basic isogeny class.

25 pages, comments welcome v2: corrected main statement