Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2015
A technical ingredient in Faltings’ original approach to $p$-adic comparison theorems involves the construction of $K({\it\pi},1)$-neighborhoods for a smooth scheme $X$ over a mixed characteristic discrete valuation ring with a perfect residue field: every point $x\in X$ has an open neighborhood $U$ whose generic fiber is a $K({\it\pi},1)$ scheme (a notion analogous to having a contractible universal cover). We show how to extend this result to the logarithmically smooth case, which might help to simplify some proofs in $p$-adic Hodge theory. The main ingredient of the proof is a variant of a trick of Nagata used in his proof of the Noether normalization lemma.