Congruences with Eisenstein series and mu-invariants

Abstract

We study the variation of mu-invariants in Hida families with residually reducible Galois representations. We prove a lower bound for these invariants which is often expressible in terms of the p-adic zeta function. This lower bound forces these mu-invariants to be unbounded along the family, and moreover, we conjecture that this lower bound is an equality. When U_p-1 generates the cuspidal Eisenstein ideal, we establish this conjecture and further prove that the p-adic L-function is simply a power of p up to a unit (i.e. lambda=0). On the algebraic side, we prove analogous statements for the associated Selmer groups which, in particular, establishes the main conjecture for such forms.