Northwestern Number Theory Seminar
Winter 2009



The seminar takes place on Mondays, 3:00-3:50PM in Lunt 107.
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Previous term





Schedule of Talks

Click on title (or scroll down) for the abstract.

January 5
Alina Cojocaru (UIC)
Twin primes for elliptic curves
January 12
Nathan Dunfield (UIUC)
Increasing the number of fibered faces of arithmetic hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
January 19
(no seminar: MLK Day)
January 26
Emmanuel Breuillard (Paris 11)
Diophantine geometry and the Tits alternative
February 2
Ben Howard (Boston College)
Intersection theory on Shimura surfaces
February 9
Suh-Hyun Choi (Harvard)
Deformation lifting spaces of mod l representations and their properties
February 16
Kiran Kedlaya (MIT)
Towards a slope filtration theorem with nondiscrete coefficients
February 23
Jay Pottharst (Boston College)
Selmer groups over eigenvarieties
February 25
Michael Harris (Paris 7)
Automorphic realization of residual Galois representations
March 2
Sug Woo Shin (Chicago)
Construction of automorphic Galois representations
March 9
Kannan Soundararajan (Stanford)
Recent progress on Quantum Unique Ergodicity






Abstracts



  • Alina Cojocaru (UIC) Twin primes for elliptic curves

    For an elliptic curve E over Q and for a prime p, we let E_p denote the reduction of E modulo p. In 1988, Neal Koblitz asked for the number of primes p < x for which E_p(F_p) forms a group of prime order. In many ways, this question may be viewed as an analogue of the classical twin prime conjecture. In my talk, I will discuss an average version of Koblitz's question. This is joint work with Antal Balog and Chantal David.

  • Nathan Dunfield (UIUC) Increasing the number of fibered faces of arithmetic hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

    I will exhibit a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold which satisfies a very strong form of Thurston's Virtual Fibration Conjecture. In particular, this manifold has finite covers which fiber over the circle in arbitrarily many fundamentally distinct ways. More precisely, it has a tower of finite covers where the number of fibered faces of the Thurston norm ball goes to infinity, in fact faster than any power of the logarithm of the degree of the cover. The example manifold M is arithmetic, and the proof uses detailed number-theoretic information, at the level of the Hecke eigenvalues, to drive a geometric argument based on Fried's dynamical characterization of the fibered faces. The origin of the basic fibration of M over the circle is the modular elliptic curve E=X_0(49), which admits multiplication by the ring of integers of Q[sqrt(-7)]. We first base change the holomorphic differential on E to a cusp form on GL(2) over K=Q[sqrt(-3)], and then transfer over to a quaternion algebra D/K ramified only at the primes above 7; the fundamental group of M is a quotient of the principal congruence subgroup of level 7 of the multiplicative group of a maximal order of D. This is joint work with Dinakar Ramakrishnan.

  • Emmanuel Breuillard (Paris 11) Diophantine geometry and the Tits alternative

    I will discuss some recent work about heights of rational points on semisimple algebraic groups and their character varieties. The main theorem can be viewed as a semisimple analog of the classical Lehmer conjecture. We will then explain how it can be used to prove a uniform version of the Tits alternative for linear groups. Finally I will describe some consequences for subgroups of GL(d,F_p).

  • Ben Howard (Boston College) Intersection theory on Shimura surfaces

    Kudla has proposed a general program to relate arithmetic intersection multiplicities of special cycles on Shimura varieties to Fourier coefficients of Eisenstein series. The lowest dimensional case, in which one intersects two codimension one cycles on the integral model of a Shimura curve, has been completed by Kudla-Rapoport-Yang. I will describe results in a higher dimensional setting: on the integral model of a Shimura surface one can consider the intersection of an embedded Shimura curve with a family of codimension two cycles of complex multiplication points. The intersection numbers of these cycles are related to Fourier coefficients of a Hilbert modular form of half-integral weight.

  • Suh-Hyun Choi (Harvard) Deformation lifting spaces of mod l representations and their properties

    Having appeared in several papers dealing with modularity problems, it is reasonable to investigate the deformation lifting spaces of Galois representations. Let our underlying residual representation be rho: G_K -> GL_n(\bar F_l), where K is over Q_p, and assume that l is not equal to p. In this case, I will introduce results on the dimension and the characterization of some irreducible components of the deformation lifting space of rho.

  • Kiran Kedlaya (MIT) Towards a slope filtration theorem with nondiscrete coefficients

    The slope filtration theorem for Frobenius modules over the Robba ring has proved to be an important tool in p-adic Hodge theory, via the construction of (phi, Gamma)-modules. However, up to now it has always been formulated in terms of a ring of power series over a discretely valued field. This restriction looks artificial when one starts studying Berger-Colmez's relative (phi, Gamma)-modules, and especially when one compares what we know about such objects to what we know in the function field setting (by recent work of Hartl). I will explain the preceding remarks and then discuss a prospective approach to the nondiscrete slope filtration theorem.

  • Jay Pottharst (Boston College) Selmer groups over eigenvarieties

    Greenberg defined Selmer groups over p-adic deformations of motives that are "ordinary". This leaves open the question of how to define a Selmer group over, for example, the eigencurve of Coleman-Mazur. We present a conjectural program to do this, using a direct generalization of Greenberg's hypothesis in the setting of (phi,Gamma)-modules, and give evidence by comparing our local conditions to Bloch-Kato's.

  • Michael Harris (Paris 7) Automorphic realization of residual Galois representations

  • Sug Woo Shin (Chicago) Construction of automorphic Galois representations

    According to the conjectural global Langlands correspondence, there should be a bijection between the set of cuspidal automorphic representations of GL(n) and the set of n-dimensional global Galois representations, over any number field, if suitable conditions are imposed on both sets. We report on a recent progress on attaching Galois representations to the cuspidal automorphic representations arising from unitary groups (via base change). Our work is built upon previous work of Kottwitz, Clozel, Harris-Taylor and Taylor-Yoshida. Morel and Clozel-Harris-Labesse have obtained results in a similar direction.

  • Kannan Soundararajan (Stanford) Recent progress on Quantum Unique Ergodicity

    An important special case of the QUE conjecture of Rudnick and Sarnak asserts that Maass cusp forms for SL_2(Z)\H become equidistributed on the fundamental domain, as the eigenvalue goes to infinity. An analogous conjecture can be formulated for holomorphic Hecke eigenforms of large weight. I'll discuss recent work that has led to a resolution of these conjectures.