On the reductions of certain two-dimensional crystabelline representations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relationship between slopes of two-dimensional crystabelline Galois representations and their modulo p reductions, revealing that most are irreducible except in specific half-integer slope cases.

Contribution

It provides new results on the reducibility of modulo p reductions of crystabelline representations with non-integer slopes, connecting slope behavior to reducibility.

Findings

Most crystabelline reductions with slopes in (0, (p-1)/2) are irreducible.

Reducibility occurs only in a small region where slopes are half-integers.

Results support conjectures relating slopes to reducibility and Galois representations.

Abstract

Crystabelline representations are representations of the absolute Galois group $G_{\mathbb{Q}_p}$ over $\mathbb{Q}_p$ that become crystalline on $G_{F}$ for some abelian extension $F/\mathbb{Q}_p$. Their relation to modular forms is that the representation associated with a finite slope newform of level divisible by $p^2$ is crystabelline. In this article we study the connection between the slopes of two-dimensional crystabelline representations and the reducibility of their modulo $p$ reductions. This question is inspired by a theorem by Buzzard and Kilford which implies that the slopes on the boundary of the $2$-adic eigencurve of tame level $1$ are integers (and in arithmetic progression); an analogous theorem by Roe which says that the same is true for the $3$-adic eigencurve; Coleman's halo conjecture and the ghost conjecture which give predictions about the slopes on the $p$-adic eigencurve of general tame level; and Hodge theoretic conjectures by Breuil, Buzzard, Emerton, and Gee which indicate that there is a connection between all of these and the slopes of locally reducible two-dimensional crystabelline representations. We prove that the reductions of certain two-dimensional crystabelline representations with slopes in $(0,\frac{p-1}{2})\backslash \mathbb{Z}$ are usually irreducible, with the exception of a small region where the slopes are half-integers and reducible representations do occur.