Formal smoothness of the Artin-Mazur formal groups
Abstract
Let be a smooth proper variety over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic . We find cohomological conditions for the Artin-Mazur formal group functors to be formally smooth. We show that if all crystalline cohomology groups of are torsion-free (e.g. if is an abelian variety) then all of the are representable and formally smooth. We then identify a necessary condition for formal smoothness, which we use to give examples, for any , of varieties for which is formally smooth when , whereas is not. The constructions are inspired by Igusa's surface with non-smooth Picard scheme. Finally, we give a condition equivalent to formal smoothness in terms of Serre's Witt vector cohomology. The strategy relies on the notion of -smoothness - where is the group algebra of - which is a condition that detects when a formal group is formally smooth, and on the use of the Nygaard filtration to relate fppf cohomology to crystalline cohomology.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.03001,
title = {Formal smoothness of the Artin-Mazur formal groups},
author = {Livia Grammatica},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.03001},
year = {2025}
}