On p-adic Versions of the Manin–Mumford Conjecture

Abstract

Abstract We establish $p$-adic versions of the Manin–Mumford conjecture, which states that an irreducible subvariety of an abelian variety with dense torsion has to be the translate of a subgroup by a torsion point. We do so in the context of certain rigid analytic spaces and formal groups over a $p$-adic field or its ring of integers, respectively. In particular, we show that the underlying rigidity results for algebraic functions generalize to suitable $p$-adic analytic functions. This leads us to uncover purely $p$-adic Manin–Mumford-type results for formal groups not coming from abelian schemes. Moreover, we observe that a version of the Tate–Voloch conjecture holds: torsion points either lie squarely on a subscheme or are uniformly bounded away from it in the $p$-adic distance.