Rigidity of p-adic cohomology classes of congruence subgroups of GL(n, Z)

We extend the work of Ash and Stevens [Ash-Stevens 97] on p-adic analytic families of p-ordinary arithmetic cohomology classes for GL(N,Q) by introducing and investigating the concept of p-adic rigidity of arithmetic Hecke eigenclasses. An arithmetic eigenclass is said to be "rigid" if (modulo twisting) it does not admit a nontrivial p-adic deformation containing a Zariski dense set of arithmetic specializations. This paper develops tools for explicit investigation into the structure of eigenvarieties for GL(N). We use these tools to prove that known examples of non-sefldual cohomological cuspforms for GL(3) are rigid. Moreover, we conjecture that for GL(3), rigidity is equivalent to non-selfduality.