Geometric methods in the p-adic Langlands program

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

The Langlands correspondence describes a connection between two disparate areas of mathematics: number theory, which includes the study of prime numbers and integer solutions of polynomial equations, and harmonic analysis, which includes the study of how light and sound decompose into waves. For example, certain instances of the Langlands correspondence connect the prime numbers dividing integer values of a polynomial to vibrational frequencies of a very symmetric surface (like the fundamental tones of a musical instrument). For applications to number theory, it is useful to study these very symmetric surfaces and related higher dimensional shapes not only with classical geometry but also with an alternative theory of geometry built up from an unusual notion of size and distance that detects divisibility by a fixed prime number. This is called p-adic geometry. The basic shapes in p-adic geometry look more like fractals such as the Cantor set than like the shapes we encounter in our day to day lives in the physical world, but it is still fruitful to try to reinterpret geometric concepts like curvature so that they can be used also in the p-adic world. The recent theory of perfectoid spaces provides a perspective on p-adic geometry that is very well suited to studying the p-adic shapes that are most important in the Langlands correspondence. This project aims to carry over ideas from calculus to the study of perfectoid spaces in order to uncover new structural properties of the Langlands correspondence that will ultimately help us understand basic questions about the integers and prime numbers. More precisely, the theory of diamonds (which are quotients of perfectoid spaces by very nice equivalence relations) furnishes a very broad foundation for p-adic geometry that includes most classical and modern objects of interest but is in many ways more similar to the theory of topological manifolds than it is to the theory of complex analytic spaces. The goal of this work is to introduce a good notion of analytic structures on diamonds and then apply this theory to study representation theoretic aspects of p-adic automorphic forms as they arise in the Langlands correspondence. A special emphasis is thus put on understanding the analytic structure on the p-adic spaces which are analogs of the universal covers of complex locally symmetric spaces that appear in the complex geometry of the Langlands correspondence. In the complex setting the analytic structure can be transported directly between the base and the universal cover because the fibers are discrete, but in the p-adic setting this is obstructed by is a non-trivial interaction between the profinite topology of the fibers and the rigid analytic topology of the base. A crucial new insight in this project is that in many cases this interaction can be understood locally by embedding the total space inside of a rigid analytic variety as a locally closed subdiamond. This gives rise in some cases to a new construction of Banach-Colmez tangent spaces via a naive notion of profinite paths, and suggests a natural criterion for perfectoidness, with potential applications to cohomological vanishing. The PI will analyze concrete examples in order to elucidate the general shape of this analytic theory while also connecting some very recent and previously disjoint ideas in the theory of p-adic automorphic forms, the p-adic geometry of Shimura varieties, and the p-adic Langlands correspondence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.