Wednesday, 5 January 2011

arithmetic geometry - current status of crystalline cohomology?

This is a "big-picture" question, but allow me to illustrate some recent progress by taking a small example close to my heart.



Let us adjoin to the field mathbbQp a primitive l-th root of 1, where p and l are primes, to get the extension K|mathbbQp. We notice that this extension is unramified if lneqp but ramified if l=p. When we adjoin all the l-power roots of 1, we get the l-adic cyclotomic character chil:operatornameGal(barmathbbQp|mathbbQp)tomathbbQtlimes which is unramified if lneqp but ramified if l=p. But we cannot just say that chip is ramified and be done with it. We have to somehow express the fact that chip is a natural and a "nice" character, not an arbitrary character operatornameGal(barmathbbQp|mathbbQp)tomathbbQtpimes, of which there are very many because the topologies on the groups operatornameGal(barmathbbQp|mathbbQp), mathbbQtpimes are somehow "compatible".



The fact that chip is a "nice" character is expressed by saying that it is crystalline. In general, we can talk of crystalline representions of operatornameGal(barmathbbQp|mathbbQp) on finite-dimensional spaces over mathbbQp; the actual definition is in terms of a certain ring mathbfBtextcris, constructed by Fontaine, which can be understood in terms of crystalline cohomology.



My illustrative example is about the l-adic criterion for an abelian variety A over mathbbQp to have good reduction. For lneqp, this can be found in a paper by Serre and Tate in the Annals, and it is called the Néron-Ogg-Shafarevich criterion. It says that A has good reduction if and only if the representation of operatornameGal(barmathbbQp|mathbbQp) on the l-adic Tate module Vl(A) is unramified.



What happens when l=p ? It is too much to expect that Vp(A) be an unramified representation when A has good reduction; we have seen that even chip is not unramified. What Fontaine proved is that the p-adic representation Vp(A) is crystalline (if A has good reduction). To complete the analogy with the case lneqp, Coleman and Iovita proved in a paper in Duke that, conversely, if the representation Vp(A) is crystalline, then the abelian variety A has good reduction.



I hope you find this enticing.

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