Subtle Invariants of $F$-crystals

Abstract

Vasiu proved that the level torsion $\ell_{\mathcal{M}}$ of an $F$-crystal $\mathcal{M}$ over an algebraically closed field of characteristic $p>0$ is a non-negative integer that is an effectively computable upper bound of the isomorphism number $n_{\mathcal{M}}$ of $\mathcal{M}$ and expected that in fact one always has $n_{\mathcal{M}} = \ell_{\mathcal{M}}$. In this paper, we prove that this equality holds.