Deforming cyclic covers in towers

Abstract

Obus-Wewers and Pop recently resolved a long-standing conjecture by Oort that says: every cyclic cover of a curve in characteristic $p>0$ lifts to characteristic zero. Sa\"idi further asks whether these covers are also "liftable in towers". We prove that the answer for the equal-characteristic version of this question is affirmative. Our proof employs the Hurwitz tree technique and the tools developed by Obus-Wewers.