Rigidity,locallysymmetricvarietiesandtheGrothendieck-Katz.PDFVIP

Rigidity, locally symmetric varieties and the Grothendieck-Katz Conjecture Benson Farb and Mark Kisin ∗ May 8, 2009 Abstract Using Margulis’s results on lattices in semisimple Lie groups, we prove the Grothendieck- Katz p-Curvature Conjecture for many locally symmetric varieties, including Hilbert- Blumenthal modular varieties and the moduli space of abelian varieties Ag when g 1. 1 Introduction In this paper we prove certain cases of the well-known p-curvature conjecture of Grothendieck- Katz stated below. The conjecture posits that one can deduce algebraic solutions of certain differential equations when one has solutions after reducing modulo a prime for almost every prime. Our main purpose is to point out that rigidity theorems from the theory of discrete subgroups of Lie groups can be fruitfully applied to this problem. More precisely, let X be a smooth connected variety over C and let V be a vector bundle on X equipped with an integrable connection ∇. Then there is a finitely generated Z-algebra R ⊂ C such that X arises from a smooth R-scheme and (V, ∇) descends to a vector bundle with integrable connection on this R-scheme. We will again denote by X and (V, ∇) the corresponding objects over R. For any maximal ideal of R, we can reduce mod to obtain a differential equation (V/V, ∇) on a smooth scheme over a finite field of characteristic p 0. Attached to this system is an invariant, the p-curvature of (V/V, ∇), which is an OX -linear map ψp (V, ∇) : Der(OX ⊗ R/, OX ⊗ R/) → EndOX (V/, V/) where Der denotes the sheaf of derivations. The map ψp (V, ∇) vanishes precisely when (V/V, ∇) has a full set of solutions, i.e. when V/V is spanned by i