The local Langlands conjecture for GL(n) over a p-adic field, n < p

Michael Harris

Published 1996-11-29Version 1

Let F be a p-adic field and n a positive integer. The local Langlands conjecture asserts the existence of a bijection between irreducible admissible representations of GL(n,F) and n-dimensional admissible representations of the Weil-Deligne group of F. This bijection is required to satisfy certain natural compatibilities, of which the most important is compatibility with local functional equations (preservation of L and epsilon factors of pairs). It is enough to construct a bijection with these properties between supercuspidal representations of GL(n,F) and n-dimensional irreducible representations of the Weil group of F. In a previous paper, the author constructed a canonical bijection on the etale cohomology of the rigid-analytic coverings of the p-adic upper half space constructed by Drinfeld. (That the map in the previous paper is a bijection was actually proved by Henniart.) However, the compatibility of epsilon factors of pairs was not shown. The present article uses a technique of non-Galois automorphic induction to show that the bijection previously constructed is compatible with epsilon factors of pairs of representations of GL(n,F) and GL(m,F) when n and m are prime to p (the tame case). This implies the local Langlands conjecture in degree < p. It is also shown how the local Langlands conjecture in general would follow from a generalization of Carayol's theorem on the bad reduction of Shimura curves to certain Shimura varieties of higher dimension.