Let
be a complete algebraically closed nonarchimedean field extension, and let
be any proper rigid space over
. Let
be any
-local system on
. By the main results in Scholze’s p-adic Hodge theory paper, the pro-etale cohomology groups
are always finitely generated
-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
-local system
. By analogy, one might guess that the cohomology groups
are always finitely generated
-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
as a rigid space over
. This is the target of the Gross-Hopkins period map
, where
is (the rigid generic fiber of the base change to
of) the Lubin-Tate deformation space of some fixed connected p-divisible group
of dimension 1 and height 2. The rational p-adic Tate module of the universal p-divisible group
descends along
to a rank two
local system
on
.
Theorem. Maintain the above setup. Then
i. For any
the group
is zero.
ii. The group
is a Banach-Colmez space over
of Dimension
.
iii. The group
is a Banach-Colmez space over
of Dimension
.
Recall that a Banach-Colmez space is a special kind of topological
-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
-vector space defined up to a finite-dimensional
-vector space. In particular, any such space has a well-defined Dimension, which is a pair in
whose entries record the
-dimension and the
-dimension of the space, respectively. So for example the space
has Dimension
, and the space
has Dimension
. Unsurprisingly, any Banach-Colmez space whose
-dimension is positive will be disgustingly infinitely generated as a
-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
be the evident sheaf on
, where e.g.
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](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%28%5Cast%29%5C%3B%5C%3B%5C%3B+0+%5Cto+%5Cmathbf%7BV%7D_%7BLT%7D+%5Cto%C2%A0%5Cmathbf%7BB%7D_%7B%5Cmathrm%7Bcrys%7D%7D%5E%7B%2B%2C%5Cvarphi%5E2%3Dp%7D+%5Cto+%5Cmathrm%7BLie%7D%28G%29%5B%5Ctfrac%7B1%7D%7Bp%7D%5D+%5Cotimes_%7B%5Cmathcal%7BO%7D_X%7D+%5Cwidehat%7B%5Cmathcal%7BO%7D%7D_X+%5Cto+0&bg=ffffff&fg=1a1a1a&s=0&c=20201002)
of sheaves on
. 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
in this setup as the period domain parametrizing admissible length one modifications of the bundle
on the Fargues-Fontaine curve. (Nb. The mysterious middle term in the sequence is really the sheaf of
-equivariant maps from
to
.)
Anyway, this reduces us to computing the groups
and
. 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
be any Banach-Colmez space over
. For any proper rigid space
, we may regard
as a (pre)sheaf on
, so in particular we can talk about the pro-etale cohomology groups
. In this notation, the natural map
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
, where it’s a tautology, and the space Colmez notates
, 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
. By the standard easy computation of
, we get that
is a copy of
for either of
, and it vanishes otherwise. In particular, in degrees 0 and 2, it has Dimension
by some of the calculations in Colmez’s original paper.
Next, we need to compute the pro-etale cohomology of
. For this, we use the fact (already in Gross and Hopkins’s original article) that
. Let
be the evident projection of sites. Combining the description of
with an easy projection formula gives an isomorphism
. Moreover,
identifies with
in degree zero and
in degree 1, and vanishes otherwise. In particular, the only nonvanishing cohomology sheaves of
are
in degree 0 and
in degree 1; moreover, the latter has no global cohomology in any degree. Feeding this information into the Leray spectral sequence for
, we get that
, so this is
for
and zero otherwise.
Finally, we can put everything together and take the long exact sequence in pro-etale cohomology associated with
. It’s easy to check that
doesn’t have any global sections, and the middle term of
has no cohomology in degree one, so we get a short exact sequence
. We’ve already identified the
here as something of Dimension
, so by the additivity of Dimensions in short exact sequences, we deduce that
has Dimension
, as desired. By a similar argument, we get an isomorphism
, which we already observed has Dimension
. The vanishing of all the other cohomologies of
also follows easily. 
BTW, there is nothing special about height
in this story; I just stuck with it for convenience. For any heght
, there is an analogous rank
-local system
on
, and one can check that e.g.
has Dimension
.
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
-local systems without globally defined lattices, and he also suggested that the cohomologies of
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
as a possible counterexample. Immediately after I gave a lecture on the Tan-Tong paper the next day, the sequence
entered my head randomly. Then everything just came out. Also, luckily, we were at a restaurant with paper tablecloths.

(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
-local systems on proper rigid spaces always Banach-Colmez spaces?