Isocrystals on unibranch varieties and open immersions

Abstract

We prove that for a connected, geometrically unibranch variety $X$ over a perfect field of positive characteristic and a dense open subset $U\subset X$, the canonical homomorphism between the Tannaka duals of the categories of overconvergent isocrystals is a quotient map. We also show that the analogous statement for convergent isocrystals, and for all isocrystals, fails. The counterexample is based on Crew's construction of a unit-root $F$-isocrystal that is convergent but not overconvergent.