Slopes in eigenvarieties for definite unitary groups

The study of eigenvarieties began with Coleman and Mazur, who constructed the first eigencurve, a rigid analytic space parametrizing $p$-adic modular Hecke eigenforms. Since then various authors have constructed eigenvarieties for automorphic forms on many other groups. We will give bounds on the eigenvalues of the $U_p$ Hecke operator appearing in Chenevier’s eigenvarieties for definite unitary groups. These bounds generalize ones of Liu-Wan-Xiao for dimension $2$, which they used to prove a conjecture of Coleman-Mazur-Buzzard-Kilford in that setting, to all dimensions. We will then discuss the ideas of the proof, which goes through the classification of automorphic representations that are principal series at $p$, and a geometric consequence.