Motivic cohomology of quaternionic Shimura varieties and level raising

Abstract

We study the motivic cohomology of the special fiber of quaternionic Shimura varieties at a prime of good reduction. We exhibit classes in these motivic cohomology groups and use this to give an explicit geometric realization of level raising between Hilbert modular forms. The main ingredient for our construction is a form of Ihara's Lemma for compact quaternionic Shimura surfaces which we prove by generalizing a method of Diamond-Taylor. Along the way we also verify the Hecke orbit conjecture for these quaternionic Shimura varieties which is a key input for our proof of Ihara's Lemma.