Canonical lifts and $$\delta $$-structures

We extend the Serre–Tate theory of canonical lifts of ordinary abelian varieties to arbitrary unpolarised families of ordinary abelian varieties parameterised by a p-adic formal scheme S. We show that the canonical lift is the unique lift to W(S) which admits a $$\delta $$ -structure in the sense of Joyal, Buium, and Bousfield. We prove analogous statements for families of ordinary p-groups and p-divisible groups.