Much work has gone into matrix representations of Galois groups, but there is a whole new class of naturally occurring representations that have as yet gone almost unnoticed. In fact, it is well-known in various areas of mathematics that the main sources of totally disconnected groups are matrix groups over local fields AND automorphism groups of locally finite trees. It is perhaps surprising then that representations of Galois groups into the latter have been almost ignored, while at the same time Galois representations into the former have been enormously effective in resolving long-standing problems in number theory.
These ``tree'' representations are important as regards topics such as the unramified Fontaine-Mazur conjecture. This conjecture states that any p-adic representation of the Galois group of an extension unramified at p (and ramified at only finitely many primes) should have finite image. In other words, p-adic representations say little about such Galois groups. This paper proposes the conjecture that these Galois groups should, on the other hand, have representations with large image (measured by Hausdorff dimension) in the automorphism group of a rooted tree. Thus, they might allow us to investigate the structure of the Galois group of infinite pro-p extensions (such as Hilbert p-class towers), something unapproachable by standard p-adic representation methods.
Given a field $K$, a polynomial $f \in K[x]$, and a suitable element $t \in K$, the set of preimages of $t$ under the iterates $f^{\circ n}$ carries a natural structure of a $d$-ary tree. We study conditions under which the absolute Galois group of $K$ acts on the tree by the full group of automorphisms. When $K=\mathbb{Q}$ we exhibit examples of polynomials of every even degree with maximal Galois action on the preimage tree, partially affirming a conjecture of Odoni. We also study the case of $K=F(t)$ and $f \in F[x]$ in which the corresponding Galois groups are the monodromy groups of the r…
For many finite groups, the Inverse Galois Problem can be approached through modular/automorphic Galois representations. This is a report explaining the basic strategy, ideas and methods behind some recent results. It focusses mostly on the 2-dimensional case and underlines in particular the importance of understanding coefficient fields.
This article is the first part of a series of three articles about compatible systems of symplectic Galois representations and applications to the inverse Galois problem. In this first part, we determine the smallest field over which the projectivisation of a given symplectic group representation satisfying some natural conditions can be defined. The answer only depends on inner twists. We apply this to the residual representations of a compatible system of symplectic Galois representations satisfying some mild hypothesis and obtain precise information on their projective images for almost all…
It is proved that every two-dimensional residual Galois representation of the absolute Galois group of an arbitrary number field lifts to a characteristic zero $p$-adic representation, if local lifting problems at places above $p$ are unobstructed.
A strategy to address the inverse Galois problem over Q consists of exploiting the knowledge of Galois representations attached to certain automorphic forms. More precisely, if such forms are carefully chosen, they provide compatible systems of Galois representations satisfying some desired properties, e.g. properties that reflect on the image of the members of the system. In this article we survey some results obtained using this strategy.
Given a global field K and a rational function phi defined over K, one may take pre-images of 0 under successive iterates of phi, and thus obtain an infinite rooted tree T by assigning edges according to the action of phi. The absolute Galois group of K acts on T by tree automorphisms, giving a subgroup G(phi) of the group Aut(T) of all tree automorphisms. Beginning in the 1980s with work of Odoni, and developing especially over the past decade, a significant body of work has emerged on the size and structure of this Galois representation. These inquiries arose in part because knowledge of G(p…
In this paper, we use a series of targeted Hunter searches to prove that the minimal prime conductor of an even icosahedral Galois representation is 1951. In addition, we give a complete list of all even icosahedral Galois representations of prime conductor less than 10,000.
We prove the indecomposability of Galois representation restricted to the p-decomposition group attached to a non CM nearly p-ordinary weight two Hilbert modular form under mild conditions.
We prove the existence of Euler systems for adjoint modular Galois representations using deformations of Galois representations coming from Hilbert modular forms and relate them to $p$-adic $L$-functions under a conjectural formula for the Fitting ideals of some equivariant congruence modules for abelian base change.
In this note we produce examples of converging sequences of Galois representations, and study some of their properties. Some of the results here are used in the preprint math.NT/0210296.
In this paper we show that two dimensional (mod p) Galois representations satisfying mild hypotheses can be lifted to p-adic Galois representations ramified at infinitely many primes such that the characteristic polynomials of Frobenius at a density one set of unramified primes are defined over the rational integers. In particular we show that often one can "density one compatibly" lift mod p and mod q Galois representations.
In 1992, Avner Ash and Mark McConnell presented computational evidence of a connection between three-dimensional Galois representations and certain arithmetic cohomology classes. For some examples they were unable to determine the attached representation. For several Hecke eigenclasses (including one for which Ash and McConnell did not find the Galois representation), we find a Galois representation which appears to be attached and show strong evidence for the uniqueness of this representation. The techniques that we use to find defining polynomials for the Galois representations include a tar…
We examine which representations of the absolute Galois group of a field of finite characteristic with image over a finite field of the same characteristic may be constructed by the Galois group's action on the division points of an appropriate Drinfeld module.
The object of this paper is the study of a class of dessins d'enfants, the so-called diameter four trees. These objects, first introduced by G. Shabat, can be considered as the simplest non trivial example of etale covers of the projective line minus three points. Their arithmetic properties are still mysterious, and their study can inspire the understanding of more general situations. Here, the main interest is devoted to the action of the absolute Galois group on these (isomorphism classes of) coverings. In particular, in many cases, we are able to distinguish Galois orbits and to describe t…
Given a pair of n-dimensional complex Galois representations over Q, we define their matching density to be the density, if it exists, of the set of places at which the traces of Frobenius of the two Galois representations are equal. We will show that the set of matching densities of such pairs of irreducible Galois representations (for all n) is dense in the interval [0, 1]. Under the strong Artin conjecture, this also implies the corresponding statement for cuspidal automorphic representations.
We give a direct approach to recover some of the results of Wiles and Tayor on modularity of certain 2-dimensional p-adic representations of the absolute Galois group of Q.
We prove new automorphy lifting theorems for residually reducible Galois representations of unitary type in which the residual representation is permitted to have an arbitrary number of irreducible constituents.
We prove that the density of ramified primes in semisimple p-adic representations of Galois groups of number fields is 0. Ravi Ramakrishna has produced examples of such representations that are infinitely ramified.
We prove some cases of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture for even Galois representations. In particular, we prove, under mild hypotheses, that there are no irreducible two-dimensional ordinary even Galois representations of $\Gal(\Qbar/\Q)$ with distinct Hodge-Tate weights. If $K/\Q$ is an imaginary quadratic field, we also prove (again, under certain hypotheses) that $\Gal(\Qbar/K)$ does not admit irreducible two-dimensional ordinary Galois representations of non-parallel weight. Finally, we prove that any weakly compatible family of two dimensional irreducible Galois representations of $\Gal(\Qb…
In this paper, we consider mod $\ell$ Galois representations of $\mathbb{Q}$. In particular, we obtain an effective criterion to distinguish two semisimple 2-dimensional, odd mod $\ell$ Galois representations up to isomorphism. Serre's conjecture (Khare-Wintenberger's theorem), Sturm's theorem, and its modification by Kohnen are used in our proof.
This article is the third and last part of a series of three articles about compatible systems of symplectic Galois representations and applications to the inverse Galois problem. This part proves the following new result for the inverse Galois problem for symplectic groups. For any even positive integer n and any positive integer d, PSp_n(F_{l^d}) or PGSp_n(F_{l^d}) occurs as a Galois group over the rational numbers for a positive density set of primes l. The result is obtained by showing the existence of a regular, algebraic, self-dual, cuspidal automorphic representation of GL_n(A_Q) with l…
In this work we provide a level raising theorem for $\mod λ^n$ modular Galois representations. It allows one to see such a Galois representation that is modular of level $N$, weight 2 and trivial Nebentypus as one that is modular of level $Np$, for a prime $p$ coprime to $N$, when a certain local condition at $p$ is satisfied. It is a generalization of a result of Ribet concerning $\mod \ell$ Galois representations.
In this paper we extend a conjecture of Ash and Sinnott relating niveau one Galois representation to the mod p cohomology of congruence subgroups of SL(n,Z) to include Galois representations of higher niveau. We then present computational evidence for our conjecture in the case n=3 in the form of three-dimensional Galois representations which appear to correspond to cohomology eigenclasses as predicted by the conjecture. Our examples include Galois representations with nontrivial weight and level, as well as irreducible three-dimensional representations which are in no obvious way related to l…
We construct infinitely ramified Galois representations $ρ$ such that the $a_l (ρ)$'s have distributions in contrast to the statements of Sato-Tate, Lang-Trotter and others. Using similar methods we deform a residual Galois representation for number fields and obtain an infinitely ramified representation with very large image, generalising a result of Ramakrishna.
We show that the image of the adelic Galois representation attached to a non-CM modular form is open in the adelic points of a suitable algebraic group. We also show a similar result for the adelic Galois representation attached to a finite set of modular forms.
In a previous article, we have proved a result asserting the existence of a compatible family of Galois representations containing a given crystalline irreducible odd two-dimensional representation. We apply this result to establish new cases of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture, namely, an irreducible Barsotti-Tate $λ$-adic 2-dimensional Galois representation unramified at 3 and such that the traces $a_p$ of the images of Frobenii verify $\Q(\{a_p^2 \}) = \Q $ always comes from an abelian variety. We also show the non-existence of irreducible Barsotti-Tate 2-dimensional Galois representations of …
In this note we relate the property of a semisimple l-adic Galois representation being "F-split" for a number field F to its having abelian image. By F-split we mean that the characteristic polynomials of Frobenii all split in F.
Using the link between mod $p$ Galois representations of $\qu$ and mod $p$ modular forms established by Serre's Conjecture, we compute, for every prime $p\leq 1999$, a lower bound for the number of isomorphism classes of continuous Galois representation of $\qu$ on a two--dimensional vector space over $\fbar$ which are irreducible, odd, and unramified outside $p$.
Given a compatible system of n-dimension l-adic Galois representations arising from étale cohomology of any complete, non-singular variety, we prove that for sufficiently large prime l, type A Galois image (in the Cartan-Killing classification) is in some sense maximal in its Zariski closure in GL(n).
This article is the second part of a series of three articles about compatible systems of symplectic Galois representations and applications to the inverse Galois problem. This part is concerned with symplectic Galois representations having a huge residual image, by which we mean that a symplectic group of full dimension over the prime field is contained up to conjugation. A key ingredient is a classification of symplectic representations whose image contains a nontrivial transvection: these fall into three very simply describable classes, the reducible ones, the induced ones and those with hu…
We show that an infinite family of odd complex 2-dimensional Galois representations ramified at 5 having nonsolvable projective image are modular, thereby verifying Artin's conjecture for a new case of examples. Such a family contains the original example studied by Buhler. In the process, we prove that an infinite family of residually modular Galois representations are modular by studying $Λ$-adic Hecke algebras.
In this article we consider mod p modular Galois representations which are unramified at p such that the Frobenius element at p acts through a scalar matrix. The principal result states that the multiplicity of any such representation is bigger than 1.
We construct plane models of the modular curve $X_H(\ell)$, and use their explicit equations to compute Galois representations associated to modular forms for values of $\ell$ that are significantly higher than in prior works.
A two-dimensional Galois representation into the Hecke algebra of Katz modular forms of weight one over a finite field of characteristic p is constructed and is shown to be unramified at p in most cases.
We prove that, on average, elliptic curves over Q have finitely many primes p for which they possess a p-adic point of order p. We include a discussion of applications to companion forms and the deformation theory of Galois representations.
In this paper, we propose an improved algorithm for computing mod $\ell$ Galois representations associated to eigenforms of arbitrary levels prime to $\ell$. Precisely, we present a method to find the Jacobians of modular curves which have the smallest possible dimensions in a well-defined sense to realize the modular Galois representations. This algorithm also works without the assumption $\ell \ge k-1$, where $k$ are the weights of the eigenforms.
In this paper, we consider Galois representations of the absolute Galois group $\text{Gal}(\overline {\mathbb Q}/\mathbb Q)$ attached to modular forms for noncongruence subgroups of $\text{SL}_2(\mathbb Z)$. When the underlying modular curves have a model over $\mathbb Q$, these representations are constructed by Scholl and are referred to as Scholl representations, which form a large class of motivic Galois representations. In particular, by a result of Belyi, Scholl representations include the Galois actions on the Jacobian varieties of algebraic curves defined over $\mathbb Q$. As Scholl re…
We present an algorithm for enumerating all odd semisimple two-dimensional mod p Galois representations unramified outside p. We also discuss the implementation of this algorithm in Sage and give a summary of the results we obtained.
In this article, I discuss material which is related to the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: elliptic curves, modular forms, Galois representations and their deformations, Frey's construction, and the conjectures of Serre and of Taniyama--Shimura.
We study $p$-adic Hodge theory for families of Galois representations over pseudorigid spaces. Such spaces are non-archimedean analytic spaces which may be of mixed characteristic, and which arise naturally in the study of eigenvarieties at the boundary of weight space. We introduce perfect and imperfect overconvergent period rings, and we use the Tate--Sen method to construct overconvergent $(φ, Γ)$-modules for Galois representations over pseudorigid spaces.
We describe the generic blocks in the category of smooth locally admissible mod $2$ representations of $\mathrm{GL}_2(\mathbb{Q}_2)$. As an application we obtain new cases of Breuil--Mézard and Fontaine--Mazur conjectures for $2$-dimensional $2$-adic Galois representations.
Building on lifting results of Ramakrishna, Khare and Ramakrishna proved a purely Galois-theoretic level-raising theorem for two-dimensional odd representations of the Galois group of Q. In this paper, we generalize these techniques from type A1 to general (semi-)simple groups. We then strengthen our previous results on constructing geometric Galois representations with exceptional monodromy groups, achieving such constructions for almost all l, rather than a density-one set, and achieving greater flexibility in the Hodge numbers of the lifts; the latter improvement requires the new level-rais…
Let $p$ be a prime number. There are properties called ``overconvergence'' and ``$F$-analyticity'' for $p$-adic Galois representations of a $p$-adic field $F$. By Berger's work, it is known that $F$-analyticity is stricter than overconvergence. In this article, we show that, in many cases, an overconvergent Galois representation is $F$-analytic up to a twist by a character. This result emphasizes the necessity of the theory of $(φ,Γ)$-modules over the multivariable Robba ring, by which we expect to study all $p$-adic Galois representations.
We construct algebras of endomorphisms in the derived category of the cohomology of arithmetic manifolds, which are generated by Hecke operators. We construct Galois representations with coefficients in these Hecke algebras and apply this technique to sharpen recent results of P. Scholze.
We give an effective version of a result reported by Serre asserting that the images of the Galois representations attached to an abelian surface with $\End(A)= \mathbb{Z}$ are as large as possible for almost every prime. Our algorithm depends on the truth of Serre's conjecture for two dimensional odd irreducible Galois representations. Assuming this conjecture we determine the finite set of primes with exceptional image.
The global deformation theory of residually reducible Galois representations with fixed auxiliary conditions is studied. We show that $\barρ:\operatorname{Gal}(\bar{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})\rightarrow \operatorname{GL}_2(\bar{\mathbb{F}}_p)$ lifts to a Hida line for which the weights range over a congruence class modulo-$p^2$. The advantage of the purely Galois theoretic approach is that it allows us to construct $p$-adic families of Galois representations lifting the actual representation $\barρ$, and not just the semisimplification.
In this article, we study deformations of conjugate self-dual Galois representations. The study has two folds. First, we prove an R=T type theorem for a conjugate self-dual Galois representation with coefficients in a finite field, satisfying a certain property called rigid. Second, we study the rigidity property for the family of residue Galois representations attached to a symmetric power of an elliptic curve, as well as to a regular algebraic conjugate self-dual cuspidal representation.
In this paper we describe an algorithm for computing mod $\ell$ Galois representations associated to modular forms of weight $k$ when $\ell <k-1$. As applications, we use this algorithm to explicitly compute the cases with $Δ_{k}$ for $k=16,20, 22, 26$ and all the unexceptional primes $\ell$ with $\ell <k-1$.
We prove in this paper an uniform surjectivity result for Galois representations associated with non-CM $\mathbb{Q}$-curves over imaginary quadratic fields, using various tools for the proof, such as Mazur's method, isogeny theorems, Runge's method and analytic estimates of sums of $L$-functions.
Under the assumption of the Hodge, Tate and Fontaine-Mazur conjectures we give a criterion for a compatible system of l-adic representations to be isomorphic to the second cohomology of a K3 surface.
In this article, we prove that for a convergent sequence of residually absolutely irreducible representations of the absolute Galois group of a number field $F$ with coefficients in a domain finite over a power series ring over a $p$-adic integer ring, the set of places of $F$ where some of the representations ramifies has density zero. Using this, we extend a result of Das--Rajan to such convergent sequences. We also establish a strong multiplicity one theorem for big Galois representations.
We study compatible families of four-dimensional Galois representations constructed in the étale cohomology of a smooth projective variety. We prove a theorem asserting that the images will be generically large if certain conditions are satisfied. We only consider representations with coefficients in an imaginary quadratic field. We apply our result to an example constructed by Jasper Scholten, obtaining a family of linear groups and one of unitary groups as Galois groups over $\mathbb{Q}$.
Let $ρ$ be the $p$-adic Galois representation attached to a cuspidal, regular algebraic, polarizable automorphic representation of $GL_n$. Assuming only that $ρ$ satisfies an irreducibility condition, we prove the vanishing of the adjoint Bloch--Kato Selmer group attached to $ρ$. This generalizes previous work of the author and James Newton.
Let $G$ be a split reductive group with $\dim Z(G) \leq 1$. We show that for any prime $p$ that is large enough relative to $G$, there is a finitely ramified Galois representation $ρ\colon Γ_{\mathbb Q} \to G(\mathbb Z_p)$ with open image. We also show that for any given integer $e$, if the index of irregularity of $p$ is at most $e$ and if $p$ is large enough relative to $G$ and $e$, then there is a Galois representation $Γ_{\mathbb Q} \to G(\mathbb Z_p)$ ramified only at $p$ with open image, generalizing a theorem of A. Ray. The first type of Galois representation is constructed by lifting a…