
CATEGORICAL p-ADIC LANGLANDS 5
[Lan80, Tun81]). In 1995, a breakthrough in our understanding of reciprocity
was achieved with the proof by Wiles [Wil95] and Taylor–Wiles [TW95] of the
modularity of semistable elliptic curves over Q, a result which was soon improved
to handle all elliptic curves over Q[BCDT01]. Building on these methods, reci-
procity has since been proved in many further interesting contexts; see Calegari’s
recent survey [Cal23] for some of the highlights of the last 25 years.
The crux of the method of [Wil95, TW95] and the many subsequent results
that build on their ideas is to prove the modularity — or, more generally, au-
tomorphy — of a p-adic Galois representation. More precisely, the Taylor–Wiles
method gives a way to deduce from the modularity of a single p-adic Galois rep-
resentation ρ1the modularity of another p-adic Galois representation ρ2which is
congruent to ρ1modulo p; this is typically referred to as modularity lifting. (We
“lift” modularity from the mod preduction of ρ1— which, since it coincides with
the mod preduction of ρ2, is inherited from that of ρ2— to the the modularity
of the p-adic representation ρ1itself.) It turns out that there are many such con-
gruences between Galois representations, and modularity can be propagated from
a single representation to many others in this way (either using a fixed prime p,
or using several different primes p). Of course, it is necessary to have an initial
supply of representations whose modularity is already known, such as CM forms,
or 2-dimensional Artin representations with solvable image (the latter being used
in Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem [Wil95]).
Modularity lifting theorems are also known as “R=T” theorems, because they
are proved by identifying a Zp-algebra R(a “Galois deformation ring”) parame-
terizing Galois representations congruent to a fixed representation ρ1with another
Zp-algebra T, a “Hecke algebra”, the endomorphism algebra of an appropriate space
of (p-adic) modular forms. Over the last 25 years it has become apparent that such
theorems should hold in great generality, although finding appropriate definitions of
Rand Tso that we literally have R=Tis still something of an art. In particular,
it has become clear (following in particular Skinner–Wiles [SW99], Wake–Wang-
Erickson [WWE17], and Newton–Thorne [NT23]) that in general Rshould be
taken to be a so-called pseudodeformation ring, i.e. a deformation ring for pseu-
dorepresentations, rather than a deformation ring for literal Galois representations.
Roughly speaking, pseudorepresentations capture the information given by
characteristic polynomials of representations; for this reason they are also known as
pseudocharacters. They were originally introduced for GL2by Wiles [Wil88], and
were considerably developed for GLdby many authors (we highlight in particular
Chenevier’s notion of a determinant [Che14], which showed how to define them
for arbitrary primes p). A theory valid for general reductive groups was introduced
by Vincent Lafforgue [Laf18].
From Lafforgue’s point of view, as recently made precise (in the setting of local
Galois representations) by Fargues–Scholze [FS21, §VIII], a pseudodeformation
ring Ris the ring of global functions on a moduli stack of L-parameters, so that
the moduli space of pseudorepresentations is a coarse moduli space4for the moduli
stack of L-parameters; and for general reductive groups, the Hecke algebra Tis
4Here and below, we use the expression “coarse moduli space” in its usual informal manner;
since stacks of L-parameters are not Deligne–Mumford stacks, they do not admit coarse moduli
spaces in the technical sense, but rather adequate moduli spaces in the sense of [Alp14].