Reflective obstructions of unitary modular varieties

Abstract: To prove that a modular variety is of general type, there are three types of obstructions: reflective, cusp and elliptic obstructions. In this paper, we give a quantitative estimate of the reflective obstructions for the unitary case. This shows in particular that the reflective obstructions are small enough in higher dimension, say greater than $138$. Our result reduces the study of the Kodaira dimension of unitary modular varieties to the construction of a cusp form of small weight in a quantitative manner. As a byproduct, we formulate and partially prove the finiteness of Hermitian lattices admitting reflective modular forms, which is a unitary analog of the conjecture by Gritsenko-Nikulin in the orthogonal case. Our estimate of the reflective obstructions uses Prasad's volume formula.