The Euler top and canonical lifts

Abstract

In this note, we prove a finiteness result for fibers that are canonical lifts in a given elliptic fibration. The question was motivated by the authors' construction of an arithmetic Euler top, and it highlights an interesting discrepancy between the arithmetic and the classical case: in the former, it is impossible to extend the flows to a compactification of the phase space, viewed as an elliptic fibration over the space of action variables.