Mod $\ell$ multiplicities in certain $U(4)$ Shimura varieties

Abstract

We use the Taylor-Wiles-Kisin patching method to investigate the multiplicities with which Hecke eigensystems appear in the mod-$\ell$ cohomology of unitary Shimura sets, associated to central simple algebras of the form $B=M_2(D)$, for $D$ a nonsplit quaternion algebra over a $CM$ field. We follow a similar strategy to the one used in our prior work for Shimura curves, exploiting the natural self-duality in this setting. Our method requires a careful analysis of certain irreducible components of local deformation rings. We introduce and analyze a new local model for local deformation rings specific to the case of a banal prime, which is significantly better behaved than the standard local models for local deformation rings. Our main result is a "multiplicity $2^a$ result", in the case where quaternion algebra $D$ ramifies only at banal primes, where $a$ is the number of places in the discriminant of $D$ which satisfy a certain Galois theoretic condition. We also prove an additional statement about the endomorphism ring of the cohomology of the Shimura set, which has an application to the study of congruence modules.