We give cases in which nearby cycles commute with pushforward from sheaves on the moduli stack of shtukas to a product of curves over a finite field. The proof systematically uses the property that taking nearby cycles of Satake sheaves on the Beilinson–Drinfeld Grassmannian with parahoric reduction is a central functor together with a ‘Zorro's lemma’ argument similar to that of Xue [Smoothness of cohomology sheaves of stacks of shtukas, Preprint (2020), arXiv:2012.12833]. As an application, for automorphic forms at the parahoric level, we characterize the image of tame inertia under the Langlands correspondence in terms of two-sided cells.

Vanishing cycles, introduced over half a century ago, are a fundamental tool for studying the topology of complex hypersurface singularity germs, as well as the change in topology of a degenerating family of projective manifolds. More recently, vanishing cycles have found deep applications in enumerative geometry, representation theory, applied algebraic geometry, birational geometry, etc. In this survey, we introduce vanishing cycles from a topological perspective and discuss some of their applications.

We prove the test function conjecture of Kottwitz and the first named author for local models of Shimura varieties with parahoric level structure attached to Weil-restricted groups, as defined by B. Levin. Our result covers the (modified) local models attached to all connected reductive groups over $p$-adic local fields with $p\geqslant 5$. In addition, we give a self-contained study of relative affine Grassmannians and loop groups formed using general relative effective Cartier divisors in a relative curve over an arbitrary Noetherian affine scheme.

Let $f$ be a quasi-homogeneous polynomial with an isolated singularity in $\mathbf{C}^{n}$. We compute the length of the ${\mathcal{D}}$-modules ${\mathcal{D}}f^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}/{\mathcal{D}}f^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}+1}$ generated by complex powers of $f$ in terms of the Hodge filtration on the top cohomology of the Milnor fiber. When $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}=-1$ we obtain one more than the reduced genus of the singularity ($\dim H^{n-2}(Z,{\mathcal{O}}_{Z})$ for $Z$ the exceptional fiber of a resolution of singularities). We conjecture that this holds without the quasi-homogeneous assumption. We also deduce that the quotient ${\mathcal{D}}f^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}/{\mathcal{D}}f^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}+1}$ is nonzero when $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}$ is a root of the $b$-function of $f$ (which Saito recently showed fails to hold in the inhomogeneous case). We obtain these results by comparing these ${\mathcal{D}}$-modules to those defined by Etingof and the second author which represent invariants under Hamiltonian flow.

In this article we give a geometric construction of a tilting perverse sheaf on Drinfeld’s compactification, by applying the nearby cycles functor to a family of nondegenerate Whittaker sheaves. Its restrictions along the defect stratification are shown to be certain perverse sheaves attached to the nilpotent radical of the Langlands dual Lie algebra. We also describe the subquotients of the monodromy filtration using the Picard–Lefschetz oscillators introduced by Schieder. We give an argument that the subquotients are semisimple based on the action, constructed by Feigin, Finkelberg, Kuznetsov, and Mirković, of the Langlands dual Lie algebra on the global intersection cohomology of quasimaps into flag varieties.

We show that the automorphic étale cohomology of a (possibly noncompact) PEL-type or Hodge-type Shimura variety in characteristic zero is canonically isomorphic to the cohomology of the associated nearby cycles over most of their mixed characteristics models constructed in the literature.

We extend the group-theoretic construction of local models of Pappas and Zhu [Local models of Shimura varieties and a conjecture of Kottwitz, Invent. Math. 194 (2013), 147–254] to the case of groups obtained by Weil restriction along a possibly wildly ramified extension. This completes the construction of local models for all reductive groups when $p\geqslant 5$. We show that the local models are normal with special fiber reduced and study the monodromy action on the sheaves of nearby cycles. As a consequence, we prove a conjecture of Kottwitz that the semi-simple trace of Frobenius gives a central function in the parahoric Hecke algebra. We also introduce a notion of splitting model and use this to study the inertial action in the case of an unramified group.

Using twisted nearby cycles, we define a new notion of slopes for complex holonomic ${\mathcal{D}}$ -modules. We prove a boundedness result for these slopes, study their functoriality and use them to characterize regularity. For a family of (possibly irregular) algebraic connections ${\mathcal{E}}_{t}$ parametrized by a smooth curve, we deduce under natural conditions an explicit bound for the usual slopes of the differential equation satisfied by the family of irregular periods of the ${\mathcal{E}}_{t}$ . This generalizes the regularity of the Gauss–Manin connection proved by Griffiths, Katz and Deligne.

We prove formulas for the number of Jordan blocks of the maximal size for local monodromies of one-parameter degenerations of complex algebraic varieties where the bound of the size comes from the monodromy theorem. In the case when the general fibers are smooth and compact, the proof calculates some part of the weight spectral sequence of the limit mixed Hodge structure of Steenbrink. In the singular case, we can prove a similar formula for the monodromy on the cohomology with compact supports, but not on the usual cohomology. We also show that the number can really depend on the position of singular points in the embedded resolution, even in the isolated singularity case, and hence there are no simple combinatorial formulas using the embedded resolution in general.

Let K be a complete discrete valuation field of mixed characteristic (0,p) with a perfect residue field k. For a semi-stable scheme over the ring of integers OK of K or, more generally, for a log smooth scheme of semi-stable type over k, we define nearby cycles as a single 𝒟-module endowed with a monodromy ∂logt, whose cohomology should give the log crystalline cohomology. We also explicitly describe the monodromy filtration of the 𝒟-module with respect to the endomorphism ∂logt, and construct a weight spectral sequence for the cohomology of the nearby cycles.

Kottwitz conjectured a formula for the (semi-simple) trace of Frobenius on the nearby cycles for the local model of a Shimura variety with Iwahori-type level structure. In this paper, we prove his conjecture in the linear and symplectic cases by adapting an argument of Gaitsgory, who proved an analogous theorem in the equal characteristic case.