THE EISENSTEIN IDEAL OF WEIGHT k AND RANKS OF HECKE ALGEBRAS

Abstract

AbstractLet p and $\ell $ be primes such that $p> 3$ and $p \mid \ell -1$ and k be an even integer. We use deformation theory of pseudo-representations to study the completion of the Hecke algebra acting on the space of cuspidal modular forms of weight k and level $\Gamma _0(\ell )$ at the maximal Eisenstein ideal containing p. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the $\mathbb {Z}_p$ -rank of this Hecke algebra to be greater than $1$ in terms of vanishing of the cup products of certain global Galois cohomology classes. We also recover some of the results proven by Wake and Wang-Erickson for $k=2$ using our methods. In addition, we prove some $R=\mathbb {T}$ theorems under certain hypotheses.