Unobstructed Hilbert modular deformation problems

Abstract: Consider the semisimple mod p reduction of the Galois representation associated to a Hilbert newform f by Carayol and Taylor. This paper discusses how, under certain conditions on f, the universal ring for deformations of this residual representation with fixed determinant is unobstructed for almost all primes. We follow the approach of Weston, who carried out a similar program for classical modular forms in 2004. As such, the problem essentially comes down to verifying that various local invariants vanish at all places dividing p or the level of the newform. We conclude with an explicit example illustrating how one can in principle find a lower bound on p such that the universal ring for deformations of the residual representation attached to f with fixed determinant is unobstructed for all primes over p.