Unitary cycles on Shimura curves and the Shimura lift I

This paper concerns two families of divisors, which we call the `orthogonal' and `unitary' special cycles, defined on integral models of Shimura curves. The orthogonal family was studied extensively by Kudla-Rapoport-Yang, who showed that they are closely related to the Fourier coefficients of modular forms of weight 3/2, while the `unitary' divisors are analogues of cycles appearing in more recent work of Kudla-Rapoport on unitary Shimura varieties. Our main result shows that these two families are related by (a formal version of) the Shimura lift.