On a conjecture of Rapoport and Zink

In their book, Rapoport and Zink constructed rigid analytic period spaces ${\mathcal {F}}^{wa}$ for Fontaine’s filtered isocrystals, and period morphisms from PEL moduli spaces of p-divisible groups to some of these period spaces. They conjectured the existence of an étale bijective morphism ${\mathcal {F}}^{a}\to {\mathcal {F}}^{wa}$ of rigid analytic spaces and of a universal local system of ? _p -vector spaces on  ${\mathcal {F}}^{a}$ . Such a local system would give rise to a tower of étale covering spaces $\breve {{\mathcal {E}}}_{{\widetilde {K}}}$ of ${\mathcal {F}}^{a}$ , equipped with a Hecke-action, and an action of the automorphism group J(? _p ) of the isocrystal with extra structure. For Hodge-Tate weights n?1 and n we construct in this article an intrinsic Berkovich open subspace ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ of ${\mathcal {F}}^{wa}$ and the universal local system on ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ . We show that only in exceptional cases ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ equals all of ${\mathcal {F}}^{wa}$ and when the Shimura group is $\operatorname {GL}_{n}$ we determine all these cases. We conjecture that the rigid-analytic space associated with ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ is the maximal possible ${\mathcal {F}}^{a}$ , and that ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ is connected. We give evidence for these conjectures. For those period spaces possessing PEL period morphisms, we show that ${\mathcal {F}}^{0}$ equals the image of the period morphism. Then our local system is the rational Tate module of the universal p-divisible group and carries a J(? _p )-linearization. We construct the tower $\breve {{\mathcal {E}}}_{{\widetilde {K}}}$ of étale covering spaces, and we show that it is canonically isomorphic in a Hecke and J(? _p )-equivariant way to the tower constructed by Rapoport and Zink using the universal p-divisible group.