Finite generation of nilpotent quotients of fundamental groups of punctured spectra

Abstract: In SGA 2, Grothendieck conjectures that the \'etale fundamental group of the punctured spectrum of a complete noetherian local domain of dimension at least two with algebraically closed residue field is topologically finitely generated. In this paper, we prove a weaker statement, namely that the maximal pro-nilpotent quotient of the fundamental group is topologically finitely generated. The proof uses $p$-adic nearby cycles and negative definiteness of intersection pairings over resolutions of singularities as well as some analysis of Lie algebras of certain algebraic group structures on deformation cohomology.