On the stability of vanishing cycles of \'etale sheaves in positive characteristic

Abstract

In positive characteristic, in contrast to the complex analytic case, vanishing cycles are highly sensitive to test functions (the maps to the henselian traits). We study this dependence and show that on a smooth surface, this dependence is generically only up to a finite jet of the test functions. We conjecture that this continues to hold in higher dimensions. We also study the class of sheaves whose vanishing cycles have the strongest stability. Among other things, we show that tame simple normal crossing sheaves belong to this class, and this class is stable under the Radon transform.