Here I will review Tate’s uniformization of Elliptic curves over and over
–adic fields. Historically, Tate’s work served as motivation for Mumford’s uniformization of
–adic hyperbolic curves, which I plan on discussing in a subsequent post. If
is an elliptic curve defined over
, the full Uniformization Theorem of Riemann surfaces implies that
, where
is a lattice inside
. Without loss of generality assume
. By factoring the quotient, note that
. Consider the analytic isomorphism
given by the exponential map
. Define
and
. Observe that
. Moreover observe that
induces an analytic isomorphism
given by . In fact, we can give an explicit analytic description of the resulting isomorphism
using q-expansions: set
,
,
,
, and
.
Theorem 1 If and
, then there exists a complex elliptic curve
and a complex–analytic isomorphism
Proof: Let denote the curve cut out by the Weierstrass equation
and define the map in the Theorem by
where indicates a fixed origin point on
. A full proof of the Theorem can be found in Silverman’s second book on elliptic curves.
The ability to compute cohomological invariants of curves is one of the main applications of classical uniformization theories. So when one studies the –adic cohomology of
–adic abelian varieties, a natural question that arises is if there exists an analogue of Theorem~1. Let
be a complete non–archimedian field of residue characteristic
with ring of integers
and maximal ideal
. If one tries to generalize the usual description of elliptic curves as the quotient of
by some lattice, issues quickly arise. First of all,
is totally disconnected with respect to its natural topology. So the notion of analyticity becomes more complicated. This issue is resolved by passing to the rigid–analytic, or more generally, the adic category. Additionally, when
is mixed characteristic,
does not contain non-trivial discrete subgroups. And when
is of characteristic
, then such subgroups may exist, but their quotients do not define Abelian varieties. The latter phenomena leads to the study of Drinfeld modules, which is an incredible subject in its own right (and I may dedicate a future blog post to it). Nevertheless, Tate’s insight was that
contains non-trivial lattices: for any
with
,
is a discrete subgroup in
. So one might hope that the uniformization in Theorem~1 can be generalized to the
–adic setting. This is indeed the case.
Theorem 2 (Tate) For each with
, there exists an elliptic curve
over
such that
is an isomorphism of rigid–analytic spaces. In particular,
is an isomorphism for each algebraic extension
of
, which is
–equivariant whenever
is Galois over
.
Proof: In fact, one defines using the same formula as in Theorem~1. The point being that
and
define
–adically convergent series. The analytic structure of
was originally formulated in terms of rigid–analytic spaces. Recall that
. Then the rigid–analytification of
is given by the base space
together with the Grothendieck topology of admissible covers
, where
,
denotes the maximal spectrum, and
is the Tate algebra in two variables. Note that
acts on the
discontinuously via
, so the quotient
is a well defined rigid–analytic space covered by the images of
and
. One then shows that
is isomorphic to
. The full proof can be found in Tate’s article A review of non-Archimedean elliptic functions.
The situation for higher–dimensional abelian varieties is similar. Consider and note there exists a natural group homomorphism
given by
. We say that
is a lattice in
if
is a lattice in
. It can be shown that
then has the structure of a rigid–analytic space that is also an abelian variety.