Twisted divided powers and applications

Abstract

In order to give a formal treatment of differential equations in positive characteristic p, it is necessary to use divided powers. One runs into an analog problem in the theory of q-difference equations when q is a pth root of unity. We introduce here a notion of twisted divided powers (relative to q) and show that one can recover the twisted Weyl algebra and obtain a twisted p-curvature map that describes the center of the twisted Weyl algebra. We also build a divided p-Frobenius that will give, by duality, a formal Azumaya splitting of the twisted Weyl algebra as well as a twisted Simpson correspondence.