Deformation of rigid Galois representations and cohomology of certain quaternionic unitary Shimura variety

Abstract

In this article, we use deformation theory of Galois representations valued in the symplectic group of degree four to prove a freeness result for the cohomology of certain quaternionic unitary Shimura variety over the universal deformation ring for certain type of residual representation satisfying a property called rigidity. This result plays an important role in the proof of the arithmetic level raising theorem for the symplectic similitude group of degree four over the field of rational numbers by the author.