Preservation of depth in local geometric Langlands correspondence

It is expected that, under mild conditions, local Langlands correspondence preserves depths of representations. In this article, we formulate a conjectural geometrisation of this expectation. We prove half of this conjecture by showing that the depth of a categorical representation of the loop group is less than or equal to the depth of its underlying geometric Langlands parameter. A key ingredient of our proof is a new definition of the slope of a meromorphic connection, a definition which uses opers. In the appendix, we consider a relationship between our conjecture and Zhu's conjecture on non-vanishing of the Hecke eigensheaves produced by Beilinson and Drinfeld's quantisation of Hitchin's fibration for non-constant groups.