This monograph treats one case of a series of conjectures by S. Kudla, whose goal is to show that Fourier of Eisenstein series encode information about the Arakelov intersection theory of special cycles on Shimura varieties of orthogonal and unitary type. Here, the Eisenstein series is a Hilbert modular form of weight one over a real quadratic field, the Shimura variety is a classical Hilbert modular surface, and the special cycles are complex multiplication points and the Hirzebruch-Zagier divisors. By developing new techniques in deformation theory, the authors successfully compute the Arakelov intersection multiplicities of these divisors, and show that they agree with the Fourier coefficients of derivatives of Eisenstein series.

"Modular Forms and Special Cycles on Shimura Curves" is a thorough study of the generating functions constructed from special cycles, both divisors and zero-cycles, on the arithmetic surface "M" attached to a Shimura curve "M" over the field of rational numbers. These generating functions are shown to be the q-expansions of modular forms and Siegel modular forms of genus two respectively, valued in the Gillet-Soule arithmetic Chow groups of "M." The two types of generating functions are related via an arithmetic inner product formula. In addition, an analogue of the classical Siegel-Weil formula identifies the generating function for zero-cycles as the central derivative of a Siegel Eisenstein series. As an application, an arithmetic analogue of the Shimura-Waldspurger correspondence is constructed, carrying holomorphic cusp forms of weight 3/2 to classes in the Mordell-Weil group of "M." In certain cases, the nonvanishing of this correspondence is related to the central derivative of the standard L-function for a modular form of weight 2. These results depend on a novel mixture of modular forms and arithmetic geometry and should provide a paradigm for further investigations. The proofs involve a wide range of techniques, including arithmetic intersection theory, the arithmetic adjunction formula, representation densities of quadratic forms, deformation theory of p-divisible groups, p-adic uniformization, the Weil representation, the local and global theta correspondence, and the doubling integral representation of L-functions."