Scholze – totallydisconnected

Fall roundup

Apologies for the lack of blogging. This has been an unusually busy fall.

My student Linus Hamann has a website! Please go there and check out his beautiful preprints, especially his paper on comparing local Langlands correspondences for GSp4.
There have been a lot of great papers this year, but I was especially struck by these gorgeous ideas from Teruhisa Koshikawa. Readers might recall that the seminal Caraiani-Scholze papers contain a fun part (p-adic geometry of Shimura varieties and their Hodge-Tate fibers, semiperversity of Hodge-Tate pushforwards) and a not fun part (arguments with the twisted stable trace formula and Shin’s stable trace formula for Igusa varieties). Koshikawa completely eliminates the not fun part, replacing it with an extremely clever use of the Fargues-Scholze machinery. Even in the setting of the CS papers, Koshikawa’s main theorem is stronger; moreover, his technique opens the door to a wide generalization of the CS vanishing results beyond the specific unitary Shimura varieties they treated. (Note for ambitious readers: The problem of working out these generalizations has already been “taken” by specific people.)
Eagle-eyed readers of H.-Kaletha-Weinstein might’ve noticed that the entire paper depends crucially on a non-existent preprint cited as [GHW]. As discussed in a previous post, the point of GHW is to construct the functor $Rf_!$ in etale cohomology for certain stacky maps of Artin v-stacks, by adapting some machinery of Liu-Zheng which they built to solve the analogous problem in the setting of Artin stacks. Since the above-mentioned papers of Hamann and Koshikawa both depend directly on HKW, and thus indirectly on GHW, I’ve felt some increased pressure recently* to actually produce this paper!
However, I think this pressure helped push me past the final points of confusion in this project, and I’m pleased to report that after nearly 4 years of struggle, the details of GHW have finally come together. I’m cautiously optimistic that the paper will be publicly available within a few months. The arguments are an infernal mixture of delicate p-adic geometry and general $\infty$ -categorical constructions. Actually, this is the most intense and frustrating project I’ve ever worked on. It will be good to finish it.
As always, David Roberts offers a voice of clarity against the nonsense burbling out from the IUT cultists.

*Both from myself and from the referee for HKW.

In this post I want to talk about some ongoing joint work with Peter Scholze. Since this came up in Scholze’s geometrization lectures, I thought it would be fun to go into a little more detail here. All inaccuracies below are entirely due to me, and the standard caveats about blog-level rigor apply.

The goal, broadly speaking, is to define a relative notion of perversity in etale cohomology, with respect to any finite type morphism $f:X \to S$ of schemes. In order to not make slightly false statements, I will take my coefficient ring to be $\mathbf{F}_\ell$ for some prime $\ell$ invertible on $S$ . Everything below also works with more general torsion coefficients killed by an integer invertible on $S$ , but then one has to be mindful of the difference between $D^{b}_{c}$ and $D^{b}_{ctf}$ . With mild assumptions on $S$ , everything below also works with $\mathbf{Q}_\ell$ -coefficients.

When $S=\mathrm{Spec}k$ is a point, $X$ is just a finite type $k$ -scheme, and we have the familiar perverse t-structure $( \phantom{}^p D^{\leq 0}(X), \phantom{}^p D^{\geq 0}(X))$ on $D(X)=D(X,\mathbf{F}_\ell)$ , with all its wonderful properties as usual. The key new definition is the following.

Definition. Given a finite type map of schemes $f:X \to S$ , let $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\leq 0}(X) \subset D(X)$ be the full subcategory of objects $A$ such that $A|X_{\overline{s}} \in \phantom{}^p D^{\leq 0}(X_{\overline{s}})$ for all geometric points $\overline{s} \to S$ .

It is easy to see that $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\leq 0}(X)$ is stable under extensions and (after upgrading to derived $\infty$ -categories) under filtered colimits, and is set-theoretically reasonable, so it defines the left half of a t-structure on $D(X)$ by Proposition 1.4.4.11 in Lurie’s Higher Algebra. We denote the right half of this t-structure, unsurprisingly, by $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\geq 0}(X)$ , and call it the relative perverse t-structure (relative to $X\to S$ , of course). We write $\phantom{}^{p/S}\tau^{\leq n}$ and $\phantom{}^{p/S}\tau^{\geq n}$ for the associated truncation functors.

This t-structure satisfies a number of good and fairly obvious formal properties which I won’t get into here (it can be glued from any open-closed decomposition of $X$ , various operations are obviously left- or right- t-exact, etc.). Less formally, if $S$ is a finite-dimensional excellent Noetherian scheme, then the relative perverse truncation functors preserve $D^{b}_{c}(X) \subset D(X)$ , so we get an induced relative perverse t-structure on $D^{b}_{c}(X)$ . This follows from some results of Gabber: roughly, one can check that the relative perverse t-structure is the t-structure associated with the weak perversity function $p(x)=-\mathrm{tr.deg}k(x)/k(f(x))$ , and that the conditions in Theorem 8.2 are satisfied for excellent $S$ . (Nb. Gabber’s methods also reprove the existence of the relative perverse t-structure for any Noetherian $S$ , without appealing to $\infty$ -categories.)

However, the right half $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\geq 0}(X)$ is defined in a very inexplicit way, and it isn’t clear how to get your hands on this at all. The really shocking theorem, then, is the following result.

Key Theorem. An object $A \in D(X)$ lies in $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\geq 0}(X)$ if and only if $A|X_{\overline{s}} \in \phantom{}^p D^{\geq 0}(X_{\overline{s}})$ for all geometric points $\overline{s} \to S$ .

Note that I really am taking *-restrictions to geometric fibers here, just as in the definition of $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\leq 0}(X)$ . One might naively guess that !-restrictions should be appearing instead, but no!

This theorem has a number of corollaries.

Corollary 1. The heart $\mathrm{Perv}(X/S)$ of the relative perverse t-structure consists of objects $A \in D(X)$ which are perverse after restriction to any geometric fiber of $f$ . In particular, the objects with this property naturally have the structure of an abelian category.

This fully justifies the choice of name for this t-structure, and shows that the heart of the relative perverse t-structure gives a completely reasonable notion of a “family of perverse sheaves parameterized by $S$ ”.

Corollary 2. For any map $T\to S$ , the pullback functor $D(X) \to D(X_T)$ is t-exact for the relative perverse t-structures (relative to $S$ and $T$ , respectively). In particular, relative perverse truncations commute with any base change on $S$ , and pullback induces an exact functor $\mathrm{Perv}(X/S) \to \mathrm{Perv}(X_T / T)$ .

Corollary 3. If $X\to S$ is any finitely presented morphism of qcqs schemes, then the relative perverse truncation functors on $D(X)$ preserve $D^{b}_{c}(X)$ .

Corollaries 1 and 2 are immediate consequences of the Key Theorem. Corollary 3 then follows from the case where $S$ is Noetherian excellent finite-dimensional by Noetherian approximation arguments, using Corollary 2 crucially.

To prove the key theorem, we make some formal reductions to the situation where $S$ is excellent Noetherian finite-dimensional and $A \in D^{b}_{c}(X)$ . In this situation, we argue by induction on $\dim S$ , with the base case $\dim S=0$ being obvious. In general, this induction is somewhat subtle, and involves playing off the relative perverse t-structure on $D(X)$ against the perverse t-structures on $D(X_{\overline{s}})$ and the (absolute) perverse t-structure on $D(X)$ (which exists once you pick a dimension function on $S$ ).

However, when $S$ is the spectrum of an excellent DVR, one can give a direct proof of the key theorem, and this is what I want to do in the rest of this post. Let $i: s \to S$ and $j: \eta \to S$ be the inclusions of the special and generic points, with obvious base changes $\tilde{i}:X_s \to X$ and $\tilde{j}: X_\eta \to X$ . By definition, $A \in D(X)$ lies in $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\leq 0}(X)$ iff $\tilde{j}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\leq 0}(X_\eta)$ and $\tilde{i}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\leq 0}(X_s)$ . By standard results on gluing t-structures (see chapter 1 in BBDG), this implies that $A$ lies in $\phantom{}^{p/S}D^{\geq 0}(X)$ iff $\tilde{j}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_\eta)$ and $R\tilde{i}^{!}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_s)$ . Thus, to prove the key theorem in this case, we need to show that for any $A \in D(X)$ with $\tilde{j}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_\eta)$ , the conditions $\tilde{i}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_s)$ and $R\tilde{i}^{!}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_s)$ are equivalent.

To show this, consider the triangle $R\tilde{i}^{!}A \to \tilde{i}^{\ast}A \to \tilde{i}^{\ast}R\tilde{j}_{\ast} \tilde{j}^{\ast} A \to$ . The crucial observation is that $\tilde{j}^{\ast}A \in \phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_\eta)$ by assumption, and that $\tilde{i}^{\ast}R\tilde{j}_{\ast}$ carries $\phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_\eta)$ into $\phantom{}^{p}D^{\geq 0}(X_s)$ . The italicized result follows from some theorems of Gabber generalizing the classical Artin-Grothendieck vanishing theorem for affine varieties, and is closely related to the well-known fact that nearby cycles are perverse t-exact. This immediately gives what we want: we now know that $\tilde{i}^{\ast}R\tilde{j}_{\ast} \tilde{j}^{\ast} A$ only can only have nonzero perverse cohomologies in degrees $\geq 0$ , so $R\tilde{i}^{!}A$ and $\tilde{i}^{\ast}A$ have the same perverse cohomologies in degrees $<0$ .

The Newton stratification is true

Let $G$ be a connected reductive group over $\mathbf{Q}_p$ , and let $\mu$ be a $G$ -valued (geometric) conjugacy class of minuscule cocharacters, with reflex field $E$ . In their Annals paper, Caraiani and Scholze defined a very interesting stratification of the flag variety $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu}$ (regarded as an adic space over $E$ ) into strata $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu}^{b}$ , where $b$ runs over the Kottwitz set $B(G,\mu^{-1})$ . Let me roughly recall how this goes: any (geometric) point $x \to \mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu}$ determines a canonical modification $\mathcal{E}_x \to \mathcal{E}_{triv}$ of the trivial $G$ -bundle on the Fargues-Fontaine curve, meromorphic at $\infty$ and with “mermorphy $\mu$ ” in the usual sense. On the other hand, Fargues proved that $G$ -bundles on the curve are classified up to isomorphism by $B(G)$ , and then Caraiani-Scholze and Rapoport proved that $\mu$ -meromorphic modifications of the trivial bundle are exactly classified by the subset $B(G,\mu^{-1})$ (CS proved that only these elements can occur; R proved that all of these elements occur). The Newton stratification just records which element of this set parametrizes the bundle $\mathcal{E}_x$ .

The individual strata are pretty weird. For example, if $G=GL_n$ and $\mu=(1,0,\dots,0)$ , then $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu} \simeq \mathbf{P}^{n-1}$ and the open stratum is just the usual Drinfeld space $\Omega^{n-1}$ , but the other strata are of the form $\Omega^{n-i-1} \times^{P_{n-i,i}(\mathbf{Q}_p)} GL_n(\mathbf{Q}_p)$ , where $P_{n-i,i}$ is the evident parabolic in $GL_n$ and the action on $\Omega^{n-i-1}$ is via the natural map $P_{n-i,i}(\mathbf{Q}_p) \twoheadrightarrow GL_{n-i}(\mathbf{Q}_p)$ . Qualitatively, this says that they’re unions of profinitely many copies of lower-dimensional Drinfeld spaces. In particular, the non-open strata are not rigid analytic spaces. There are also examples of strata which don’t have any classical rigid analytic points. However, the $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu}^{b}$ ‘s are always perfectly well-defined from the topological or diamond point of view.

Anyway, I’m getting to the following thing, which settles a question left open by Caraiani-Scholze.

Theorem. Topologically, the Newton stratification of $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu}$ is a true stratification: the closure of any stratum is a union of strata.

The idea is as follows. After base-changing from $E$ to the completed maximal unramified extension $E'$ (which is a harmless move), there is a canonical map $\zeta: \mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu,E'} \to \mathrm{Bun}_{G}$ sending $x$ to the isomorphism class of $\mathcal{E}_x$ . Here $\mathrm{Bun}_{G}$ denotes the stack of $G$ -bundles on the Fargues-Fontaine curve, regarded as a stack on the category of perfectoid spaces over $\overline{\mathbf{F}_p}$ . This stack is stratified by locally closed substacks $\mathrm{Bun}_{G}^{b}$ defined in the obvious way, and by construction the Newton stratification is just the pullback of this stratification along $\zeta$ . Now, by Fargues’s theorem we get an identification $|\mathrm{Bun}_{G}| = B(G)$ , so it is completely trivial to see that the stratification of $\mathrm{Bun}_{G}$ is a true stratification (at the level of topological spaces). We then conclude by the following observation:

Proposition. The map $\zeta$ is universally open.

The idea is to observe that $\zeta$ factors as a composition of two maps $\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu,E'} \to [\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu,E'}/\underline{G(\mathbf{Q}_p)}] \to \mathrm{Bun}_{G}$ . Here the first map is a $\underline{G(\mathbf{Q}_p)}$ -torsor by construction, so it’s universally open by e.g. Lemma 10.13 here. More subtly, the second map is also universally open. Why? Because it is cohomologically smooth in the sense of Definition 23.8 here; universal openness then follows by Proposition 23.11 in the same document.

For the cohomological smoothness claim, take any affinoid perfectoid space with a map $T \to \mathrm{Bun}_{G}$ , corresponding to some bundle $\mathcal{F} / \mathcal{X}_T$ . After some thought, one works out the fiber product $X = T \times_{\mathrm{Bun}_{G}} [\mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu,E'}/\underline{G(\mathbf{Q}_p)}]$ “explicitly”: it parametrizes untilts of $T$ over $E'$ together with isomorphism classes of $\mu^{-1}$ -meromorphic modifications $\mathcal{E}\to \mathcal{F}$ supported along the section $T^{\sharp} \to \mathcal{X}_T$ induced by our preferred untilt, with the property that $\mathcal{E}$ is trivial at every geometric point of $T$ . Without the final condition, we get a larger functor $X'$ which etale-locally on $T$ is isomorphic to $T \times_{\mathrm{Spd}(\overline{\mathbf{F}_p})} \mathcal{F}\ell_{G,\mu^{-1},E'}^{\lozenge}$ . (To get the latter description, note that etale-locally on $T$ we can trivialize $\mathcal{F}$ on the formal completion of the curve along $T^{\sharp}$ , and then use Beauville-Laszlo to interpret the remaining data as a suitably restricted modification of the trivial $G$ -torsor on $\mathrm{Spec} \mathbf{B}_{dR}^{+}(\mathcal{O}(T^{\sharp}))$ . This is a Schubert cell in a Grassmannian. Then use Caraiani-Scholze’s results on the Bialynicki-Birula map.) Anyway anyway, after a little more fiddling around the point is basically that the projection $X' \to T$ is cohomologically smooth because it’s the base change of a smooth map of rigid spaces. By Kedlaya-Liu plus epsilon, the natural map $X \to X'$ is an open immersion, so $X \to T$ is cohomologically smooth. Since $T$ was arbitrary, this is enough.

A counterexample

Let $C/\mathbf{Q}_p$ be a complete algebraically closed nonarchimedean field extension, and let $X$ be any proper rigid space over $C$ . Let $\mathbf{L}$ be any $\mathbf{Z}_p$ -local system on $X_{\mathrm{proet}}$ . By the main results in Scholze’s p-adic Hodge theory paper, the pro-etale cohomology groups $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{L})$ are always finitely generated $\mathbf{Z}_p$ -modules. It also seems likely that Poincare duality holds in this setting (and maybe someone has proved this?).

Suppose instead that we’re given a $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -local system $\mathbf{V}$ . By analogy, one might guess that the cohomology groups $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V})$ are always finitely generated $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -vector spaces. Indeed, this (and more) was claimed as a theorem by Kedlaya-Liu in a 2016 preprint. However, it is false. The goal of this post is to work out an explicit counterexample.

So, consider $X=\mathbf{P}^1$ as a rigid space over $C$ . This is the target of the Gross-Hopkins period map $\pi_{\mathrm{GM}}: \mathcal{M} \to X$ , where $\mathcal{M}$ is (the rigid generic fiber of the base change to $\mathcal{O}_C$ of) the Lubin-Tate deformation space of some fixed connected p-divisible group $G_0/\overline{\mathbf{F}_p}$ of dimension 1 and height 2. The rational p-adic Tate module of the universal p-divisible group $G/\mathcal{M}$ descends along $\pi_{\mathrm{GM}}$ to a rank two $\mathbf{Q}_p$ local system $\mathbf{V}_{LT}$ on $X$ .

Theorem. Maintain the above setup. Then
i. For any $i \neq 1,2$ the group $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT})$ is zero.
ii. The group $H^1_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT})$ is a Banach-Colmez space over $C$ of Dimension $(1,-2)$ .
iii. The group $H^2_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT})$ is a Banach-Colmez space over $C$ of Dimension $(1,2)$ .

Recall that a Banach-Colmez space is a special kind of topological $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -vector space (really it’s a functor valued in such things, but I’ll be a little sloppy about this point). Morally, it’s something like a finite-dimensional $C$ -vector space defined up to a finite-dimensional $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -vector space. In particular, any such space has a well-defined Dimension, which is a pair in $\mathbf{Z}_{\geq 0} \times \mathbf{Z}$ whose entries record the $C$ -dimension and the $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -dimension of the space, respectively. So for example the space $C^2$ has Dimension $(2,0)$ , and the space $C/\mathbf{Q}_p$ has Dimension $(1,-1)$ . Unsurprisingly, any Banach-Colmez space whose $C$ -dimension is positive will be disgustingly infinitely generated as a $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -vector space, so the Theorem really does give us an example of the desired type. Note also that Poincare duality fails in this example.

Proof. Let $\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p}$ be the evident sheaf on $X_{\mathrm{proet}}$ , where e.g. $\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+}$ is the crystalline period sheaf defined in Tan-Tong’s paper on crystalline comparison. The key observation is that there is a short exact sequence

$(\ast)\;\;\; 0 \to \mathbf{V}_{LT} \to \mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p} \to \mathrm{Lie}(G)[\tfrac{1}{p}] \otimes_{\mathcal{O}_X} \widehat{\mathcal{O}}_X \to 0$

of sheaves on $X_{\mathrm{proet}}$ . This is a sheaf-theoretic version of the sequence (1.0.1) in Scholze-Weinstein, and it can be constructed using the methods in their paper. One can also construct it directly using the modern fancy-pants interpretation of $X$ in this setup as the period domain parametrizing admissible length one modifications of the bundle $\mathcal{O}(1/2)$ on the Fargues-Fontaine curve. (Nb. The mysterious middle term in the sequence is really the sheaf of $\varphi$ -equivariant maps from $H^1_{\mathrm{crys}}(G_0/W(\overline{\mathbf{F}_p}))[\tfrac{1}{p}]$ to $\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+}$ .)

Anyway, this reduces us to computing the groups $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p})$ and $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathrm{Lie}(G)[\tfrac{1}{p}] \otimes_{\mathcal{O}_X} \widehat{\mathcal{O}}_X)$ . This might look a bit terrifying, but it’s not so bad. In fact, the first of these can be handled by a general lemma.

Lemma. Let $\mathbf{M}$ be any Banach-Colmez space over $C$ . For any proper rigid space $X/C$ , we may regard $\mathbf{M}$ as a (pre)sheaf on $X_{\mathrm{proet}}$ , so in particular we can talk about the pro-etale cohomology groups $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{M})$ . In this notation, the natural map $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{Q}_p) \otimes_{\mathbf{Q}_p} \mathbf{M}(C) \to H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{M})$ is an isomorphism.

(Proof sketch: Use the 5 lemma to reduce to the case of effective Banach-Colmez spaces, and then to the cases of the space $\mathbf{Q}_p$ , where it’s a tautology, and the space Colmez notates $\mathbb{V}^1$ , where it follows from the primitive comparison theorem, cf. Theorem 3.17 in Scholze’s CDM survey.)

Applied to our problem, this immediately gives that $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p}) \cong H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{Q}_p) \otimes_{\mathbf{Q}_p} B_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2 = p}$ . By the standard easy computation of $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{Q}_p)$ , we get that $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p})$ is a copy of $B_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p}$ for either of $i \in \{ 0,2 \}$ , and it vanishes otherwise. In particular, in degrees 0 and 2, it has Dimension $(1,2)$ by some of the calculations in Colmez’s original paper.

Next, we need to compute the pro-etale cohomology of $\mathcal{E} = \mathrm{Lie}(G)[\tfrac{1}{p}] \otimes_{\mathcal{O}_X} \widehat{\mathcal{O}}_X$ . For this, we use the fact (already in Gross and Hopkins’s original article) that $\mathrm{Lie}(G)[\tfrac{1}{p}] \simeq \mathcal{O}_X(1)$ . Let $\lambda : X_{\mathrm{proet}} \to X_{\mathrm{an}}$ be the evident projection of sites. Combining the description of $\mathrm{Lie}(G)[\tfrac{1}{p}]$ with an easy projection formula gives an isomorphism $E\overset{def}{=}R\lambda_{\ast} \mathcal{E} \cong \mathcal{O}_X (1) \otimes_{\mathcal{O}_X} R\lambda_{\ast} \widehat{\mathcal{O}}_X$ . Moreover, $R^i \lambda_{\ast} \widehat{\mathcal{O}}_X \simeq \Omega_{X}^i$ identifies with $\mathcal{O}_X$ in degree zero and $\mathcal{O}_X(-2)$ in degree 1, and vanishes otherwise. In particular, the only nonvanishing cohomology sheaves of $E$ are $\mathcal{O}_X(1)$ in degree 0 and $\mathcal{O}_X(-1)$ in degree 1; moreover, the latter has no global cohomology in any degree. Feeding this information into the Leray spectral sequence for $\lambda$ , we get that $H^i_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathcal{E}) \simeq H^i(X,E) \simeq H^i(X, \tau^{\leq 0} E) \simeq H^i(X,\mathcal{O}_X(1))$ , so this is $C^2$ for $i=0$ and zero otherwise.

Finally, we can put everything together and take the long exact sequence in pro-etale cohomology associated with $(\ast)$ . It’s easy to check that $\mathbf{V}_{LT}$ doesn’t have any global sections, and the middle term of $(\ast)$ has no cohomology in degree one, so we get a short exact sequence $0 \to H^0_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{B}_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p}) \to C^2 \to H^1_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT}) \to 0$ . We’ve already identified the $H^0$ here as something of Dimension $(1,2)$ , so by the additivity of Dimensions in short exact sequences, we deduce that $H^1_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT})$ has Dimension $(1,-2)$ , as desired. By a similar argument, we get an isomorphism $H^2_{\mathrm{proet}}(X,\mathbf{V}_{LT}) \simeq B_{\mathrm{crys}}^{+,\varphi^2=p}$ , which we already observed has Dimension $(1,2)$ . The vanishing of all the other cohomologies of $\mathbf{V}_{LT}$ also follows easily. $\square$

BTW, there is nothing special about height $2$ in this story; I just stuck with it for convenience. For any heght $h \geq 2$ , there is an analogous rank $h$ $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -local system $V_{LT,h}$ on $\mathbf{P}^{h-1}$ , and one can check that e.g. $H^1_{\mathrm{proet}}(\mathbf{P}^{h-1},\mathbf{V}_{LT,h})$ has Dimension $(h-1,-h)$ .

Let me briefly explain the genesis of these calculations. Several months ago Shizhang Li pointed out to me that the primitive comparison theorem doesn’t obviously generalize to $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -local systems without globally defined lattices, and he also suggested that the cohomologies of $\mathbf{V}_{LT}$ might be strange. I promptly forgot about this conversation until Monday, when Shizhang reported that Ruochuan Liu had told him in Oberwolfach several weeks ago that the Kedlaya-Liu “theorem” was false. It was then natural to double down on $\mathbf{V}_{LT}$ as a possible counterexample. Immediately after I gave a lecture on the Tan-Tong paper the next day, the sequence $(\ast)$ entered my head randomly. Then everything just came out. Also, luckily, we were at a restaurant with paper tablecloths.

scratch

(I’m not sure whether Ruochuan also had this particular counterexample in mind.)

There are lots of interesting questions here, I think. Are there other natural examples of this type? Are the pro-etale cohomology groups of $\mathbf{Q}_p$ -local systems on proper rigid spaces always Banach-Colmez spaces?

Some disconnected thoughts

Sorry for the silence here, the last six months have been pretty busy. Anyway, here are some small and miscellaneous thoughts.

$\bullet$ Dan Abramovich is a really excellent and entertaining writer. I especially recommend this BAMS review of books by Cutkosky and Kollar, and this survey article for the 2018 ICM; after reading these, you’ll feel like you really understand what “resolution of singularities” looks like as a working field. His mathscinet review of Fesenko’s IUTT survey is also deeply funny – let us hope that the phrase “resounding partial success” enters common usage.

$\bullet$ Speaking of the 2018 ICM, Scholze’s article is also now available here. I was amused to see a reference to “prismatic cohomology” in the last paragraph – when I visited Bhargav in October, this object had a truly horrible and useless provisional name, so it’s great to see that name replaced by such a perfect and suggestive one. (This is a new cohomology theory which is closely related to crystalline cohomology, and is also morally related to diamonds – cf. these notes for the actual definition.)

$\bullet$ Recently I had need of the following result:
Lemma. Let $S=\mathrm{Spec}\,A$ be the spectrum of a valuation ring, with generic point $\eta \in S$ . Let $X \to S$ be a separated and finite type map of schemes, and let $x: \eta \to X_{\eta}$ be a section over the generic point of $S$ , with scheme-theoretic image $Z \subset X$ . Then the induced map $Z \to S$ is an open immersion.

Note that if $X \to S$ is proper, then $Z \to S$ is an isomorphism. Anyway, I ended up working out two proofs: a short argument relying on Nagata compactification, and a longer argument which avoided this result but used some other pretty tricky stuff, including Zariski’s main theorem and Raynaud-Gruson’s magic theorem that if $R$ is a domain, then any flat finite type $R$ -algebra is finitely presented. If someone knows a truly elementary proof of this lemma, I’d be interested to see it.

Next time I’ll say something about what I needed this for…

Diamonds for all!

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I’m obsessed with diamonds. They can thus imagine my happiness when Peter posted an official foundational reference for diamonds a few weeks ago.

I want to use this occasion to make a remark aimed at graduate students etc. who might be wondering whether they should bother learning this stuff: in my opinion, spending time with difficult* manuscripts like the one above usually pays off in the long run. Of course, this only works if you invest a reasonable amount of time, and there’s some initial period where you’re completely befuddled, but after some months the befuddlement metamorphoses into understanding, and then you have a new set of tools in your toolkit! This shouldn’t be so surprising, though; after all, papers like this are difficult precisely because they are so rich in new ideas and tools.

Really, I’ve had this experience many times now – with the paper linked above and its precedent, with the Kedlaya-Liu “Relative p-adic Hodge theory” series, with Kato’s paper on p-adic Hodge theory and zeta functions of modular forms, etc. – and it was the same every time: for some period of months (or years) I would just read the thing for its own sake, but then at some point something in it would congeal with the rest of the swirling fragments in my head and stimulate me to an idea which never would’ve occurred to me otherwise. It’s the most fun thing in the world. Try it yourself.

*Here by “difficult” I don’t mean anything negative, but rather some combination of dense/forbidding/technical – something with a learning curve. Of course, there are plenty of papers which are difficult for bad reasons, e.g. because they’re poorly written. Don’t read them.

Report from Tucson

Just back from the 2017 Arizona Winter School on perfectoid spaces. First of all, I should say that everything was impressively well-organized, and that the lecturers did a fantastic job, especially considering the technical weight of this material. (Watch the videos if you don’t believe me.) Jared Weinstein, in particular, has an almost supernatural ability to make a lecture on some technical thing feel comforting.

Now to the jokes.

In his opening lecture, Scholze called perfectoid spaces a “failed theory”, on account of his inability to completely settle weight-monodromy. “You see, I’m Prussian, and when a Prussian says he wants to do something, he really feels responsible for doing it.”
Audience member: “Why are they called diamonds?”
Scholze: “[oral explanation of the picture on p. 63 of the Berkeley notes]”
Weinstein: “Also, diamonds are hard.”
Anon.: “When you’re organizing a conference, the important thing is not to give in and be the first one who actually does stuff. Because then you’ll end up doing everything! Don’t do that! Don’t be the dumb one!”
Me: “Didn’t you organize [redacted] a couple of years ago?”
Anon.: “Yeah… It turned out that Guido Kings was the dumb one.”
Mazur: “It just feels like the foundations of this area aren’t yet… hmm…”
Me: “Definitive?”
Mazur: “Yes, exactly. I mean, if Grothendieck were here, he would be screaming.”
“Do you ever need more than two legs?”
During the hike, someone sat on a cactus.
Finally, here is a late night cartoon of what a universal cohomology theory over $\mathbb{Z}$ might look like (no prizes for guessing who drew this):

Elliptic curves over Q(i) are potentially automorphic

This spectacular theorem was announced by Richard Taylor on Thursday, in a lecture at the joint meetings. Taylor credited this result and others to Allen-Calegari-Caraiani-Gee-Helm-Le Hung-Newton-Scholze-Taylor-Thorne (!), as an outcome of the (not so) secret mini-conference which took place at the IAS this fall. The key new input here is work in progress of Caraiani-Scholze on the cohomology of non-compact unitary Shimura varieties, which can be leveraged to check (at least in some cases) the most difficult hypothesis in the Calegari-Geraghty method: local-global compatibility at l=p for torsion classes.

The slides from my talk can be found here. Naturally I managed to say “diamond” a bunch of times.

w-local spaces are amazing

Let $X$ be a spectral space. Following Bhatt-Scholze, say $X$ is w-local if the subset $X^c$ of closed points is closed and if every connected component of $X$ has a unique closed point. This implies that the natural composite map $X^c \to X \to \pi_0(X)$ is a homeomorphism (cf. Lemma 2.1.4 of BS).

For the purposes of this post, a w-local adic space is a qcqs analytic adic space whose underlying spectral topological space is w-local. These are very clean sorts of spaces: in particular, each connected component of such a space is of the form $\mathrm{Spa}(K,K^+)$ , where $K$ is a nonarchimedean field and $K^+$ is an open and bounded valuation subring of $K$ , and therefore has a unique closed point and a unique generic point.

I’ve been slowly internalizing the philosophy that w-local affinoid perfectoid spaces have a lot of amazing properties. Here I want to record an example of this sort of thing.

Given a perfectoid space $\mathcal{X}$ together with a subset $T \subseteq |\mathcal{X}|$ , let’s say $T$ is perfectoid (resp. affinoid perfectoid) if there is a pair $(\mathcal{T},f)$ where $\mathcal{T}$ is a perfectoid space (resp. affinoid perfectoid space) and $f: \mathcal{T} \to \mathcal{X}$ is a map of adic spaces identifying $|\mathcal{T}|$ homeomorphically with $T$ and which is universal for maps of perfectoid spaces $\mathcal{Y} \to \mathcal{X}$ which factor through $T$ on topological spaces. Note that if the pair $(\mathcal{T},f)$ exists, it’s unique up to unique isomorphism.

Theorem. Let $\mathcal{X}$ be a w-local affinoid perfectoid space. Then any subset $T$ of $X = |\mathcal{X}|$ which is closed and generalizing, or which is quasicompact open, is affinoid perfectoid.

Proof when $T$ is closed and generalizing. The key point here is that the map $\gamma: X \to \pi_0(X)$ defines a bijection between closed generalizing subsets of $X$ and closed subsets of the (profinite) space $pi_0(X)$ , by taking preimages of the latter or images of the former. To check that this is true, note that if $T$ is closed and generalizing, then its intersection with a connected component $X'$ of $X$ being nonempty implies (since $T$ is generalizing) that $T \cap X'$ contains the unique rank one point of $X'$ . But then $T \cap X'$ contains all specializations of that point (since $T \cap X'$ is closed in $X'$ ), so $T \cap X' = X'$ , so any given connected component of $X$ is either disjoint from $T$ or contained entirely in $T$ . This implies that $T$ can be read off from which closed points of $X$ it contains. Finally, one easily checks that $\gamma(T)$ is closed in $\pi_0(X)$ , since $\pi_0(X)$ is profinite and $\gamma(T)$ is quasicompact. Therefore $T = \gamma^{-1}(\gamma(T))$ .

Returning to the matter at hand, write $\gamma(T)$ as a cofiltered intersection of qc opens $V_i \subset \pi_0(X)$ , $i \in I$ . But qc opens in $\pi_0(X)$ are the same as open-closed subsets, so each $V_i$ pulls back to an open-closed subset $U_i \subset X$ , and its easy to check that any such $U_i$ comes from a unique rational subset $\mathcal{U}_i \subset \mathcal{X}$ . Then $\mathcal{T} := \lim_{\leftarrow i \in I} \mathcal{U}_i$ is the perfectoid space we seek.

Proof when $T$ is quasicompact open.

First we prove the result when $X$ is connected, i.e. when $\mathcal{X} = \mathrm{Spa}(K,K^+)$ as above. We claim that in fact $T$ is a rational subset of $X$ . When $T$ is empty, this is true in many stupid ways, so we can assume $T$ is nonempty. Since $T$ is a qc open, we can find finitely many nonempty rational subsets $\mathcal{W}_i = \mathrm{Spa}(K,K^{+}_{(i)}) \subset \mathcal{X}$ such that $T = \cup_i |\mathcal{W}_i|$ . But the $\mathcal{W}_i$ ‘s are totally ordered, since any finite set of open bounded valuation subrings of $K$ is totally ordered by inclusion (in the opposite direction), so $T = |\mathcal{W}|$ where $\mathcal{W}$ is the largest $\mathcal{W}_i$ .

Now we turn to the general case. For each point $x \in \pi_0(X)$ , we’ve proved that $T \cap \gamma^{-1}(x)$ is a rational subset (possibly empty) of the fiber $\gamma^{-1}(x)$ . Since $\gamma^{-1}(x) = \lim_{\substack{\leftarrow}{V_x \subset \pi_0(X) \mathrm{qc\,open}, x\in V_x}} \gamma^{-1}(V_x)$ and each $\gamma^{-1}(V_x)$ is the topological space of a rational subset $\mathcal{U}_x$ of $\mathcal{X}$ , it’s now easy to check* that for every $x$ and for some small $V_x$ as above, there is a rational subset $\mathcal{T}_x \subset \mathcal{U}_x$ such that $|\mathcal{T}_x| = U_x \cap T$ . Choose such a $V_x$ for each point in $\pi_0(X)$ . Since $\pi_0(X) = \cup_x V_x$ , we can choose finitely many $x$ ‘s $\{x_i\}_{i\in I}$ such that the $V_{x_i}$ ‘s give a covering of $\pi_0(X)$ . Since each of these subsets is open-closed in $\pi_0(X)$ , we can refine this covering to a covering of $\pi_0(X)$ by finitely many pairwise-disjoint open-closed subsets $W_j, j \in J$ where $W_j \subseteq V_{x_{i(j)}}$ for all $j$ and for some (choice of) $i(j) \in I$ . Then $\gamma^{-1}(W_j)$ again comes from a rational subset $\mathcal{S}_j$ of $\mathcal{X}$ , so the intersection $|\mathcal{T}_{x_{i(j)}}| \cap \gamma^{-1}(W_j)$ comes from the rational subset $\mathcal{T}_j := \mathcal{T}_{x_{i(j)}} \times_{\mathcal{U}_{x_{i(j)}}} \mathcal{S}_j$ of $X$ , and since $|\mathcal{T}_j| = T \cap \gamma^{-1}(W_j)$ by design, we (finally) have that $\mathcal{T} = \coprod_{j} \mathcal{T}_j \subset \coprod_{j} S_j = \mathcal{X}$ is affinoid perfectoid. Whew! $\square$

*Here we’re using the “standard” facts that if $X_i$ is a cofiltered inverse system of affinoid perfectoid spaces with limit $X$ , then $|X| = \lim_{\leftarrow i} |X_i|$ , and any rational subset $W \subset X$ is the preimage of some rational subset $W_i \subset X_i$ , and moreover if we have two such pairs $(i,W_i)$ and $(j,W_j)$ with the $W_{\bullet}$ ‘s both pulling back to $W$ then they pull back to the same rational subset of $X_k$ for some large $k \geq i,j$ .

Let $T$ be a subset of a spectral space $X$ ; according to the incredible Lemma recorded in Tag 0A31 in the Stacks Project, the following are equivalent:

$T$ is generalizing and pro-constructible;
$T$ is generalizing and quasicompact;
$T$ is an intersection of quasicompact open subsets of $X$ .

Moreover, if $T$ has one of these equivalent properties, $T$ is spectral. (Johan tells me this lemma is “basically due to Gabber”.) Combining this result with the Theorem above, and using the fact that the category of affinoid perfectoid spaces has all small limits, we get the following disgustingly general statement.

Theorem. Let $\mathcal{X}$ be a w-local affinoid perfectoid space. Then any generalizing quasicompact subset $T \subset |\mathcal{X}|$ is affinoid perfectoid.

By an easy gluing argument, this implies even more generally (!) that if $T \subset |\mathcal{X}|$ is a subset such that every point $t\in T$ has a qc open neighborhood $U_t$ in $|\mathcal{X}|$ such that $T \cap U_t$ is quasicompact and generalizing, then $T$ is perfectoid (not necessarily affinoid perfectoid). This condition* holds, for example, if $T$ is locally closed and generalizing; in that situation, I’d managed to prove that $T$ is perfectoid back in May (by a somewhat clumsy argument, cf. Section 2.7 of this thing if you’re curious) after Peter told me it was so. But the argument here gives a lot more.

*Johan’s opinion of this condition: “I have no words for how nasty this is.”

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Tag: Scholze