Elliptic minuscule pairs and splitting abelian varieties

Abstract

We partially answer, in terms of monodromy, Murty and Patankar's question: Given an absolutely simple abelian variety over a number field, does it have simple specializations at a set of places of positive Dirichlet density? The answer is based on the classification of pairs (G,V) consisting of a semi-simple algebraic group G over a non-archimedean local field and an absolutely irreducible representation V of G such that G admits a maximal torus acting irreducibly on V.