Existential uniform $p$-adic integration and descent for integrability and largest poles

Abstract

Since the work by Denef, $p$-adic cell decomposition provides a well-established method to study $p$-adic and motivic integrals. In this paper, we present a variant of this method that keeps track of existential quantifiers. This enables us to deduce descent properties for $p$-adic integrals. In particular, we show that integrability for `existential' functions descends from any $p$-adic field to any $p$-adic subfield. As an application, we obtain that the largest pole of the Serre-Poincar\'e series can only increase when passing to field extensions. As a side result, we prove a relative quantifier elimination statement for Henselian valued fields of characteristic zero that preserves existential formulas.