Integral monodromy groups of Kloosterman sheaves

Abstract

We show that integral monodromy groups of Kloosterman $\ell$-adic sheaves of rank $n\ge 2$ on $\mathbb{G}_m/\mathbb{F}_q$ are as large as possible when the characteristic $\ell$ is large enough, depending only on the rank. This variant of Katz's results over $\mathbb{C}$ was known by works of Gabber, Larsen, Nori and Hall under restrictions such as $\ell$ large enough depending on $\operatorname{char}(\mathbb{F}_q)$ with an ineffective constant, which is unsuitable for applications. We use the theory of finite groups of Lie type to extend Katz's ideas, in particular the classification of maximal subgroups of Aschbacher and Kleidman-Liebeck. These results will apply to study reductions of hyper-Kloosterman sums in forthcoming work.