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Algebra Seminar

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 4:00pm

Joel Bellaiche

Columbia University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4N30

One of the main reason of the arithmetical significance of automorphic representations is that we can, according to Langlands' philosophy (sometimes only conjecturally) associate to them in a precise way Galois representations. In the last three decades, p-adic families of (p-adic) automorphic forms, parametrized by rigid analytic spaces, have been constructed and studied. Those leads in many cases to "p-adic families of Galois representations", the precise definition of which requires the notion of "pseudorepresentation" or "pseudocharacter". In this talk, based on a joint work with Gaetan Chenevier, I will relate our attempt to begin a systematic studies of those families of Galois representations, and of how we can use them to construct non-trivial extensions between Galois representations : after recalling the notion of, and proving some results on "pseudocharacters", I will explain how we can control the "reducibility locus" of p-adic families, and apply our results to family of Galois representations attached to automorphic forms on unitary groups.