Conductors and the moduli of residual perfection

Abstract

Let A be a complete discrete valuation ring with possibly imperfect residue field. The purpose of this paper is to give a notion of conductor for Galois representations over A that generalizes the classical Artin conductor. The definition rests on two general results: there is a moduli space that parametrizes the ways of modifying A so that its residue field is perfect, and any information about a Galois-theoretic object over A can be recovered from its pullback to the (residually perfect) discrete valuation ring corresponding to the generic point of this moduli space.