A Riemann-Hilbert Correspondence in p-adic Geometry, Lecture 1

At the start of the 20th century, David Hilbert asked which representations can arise by studying the monodromy of Fuchsian equations. This question was the starting point for a beautiful circle of ideas relating the topology of a complex algebraic variety X to the study of algebraic differential equations. A central result is the celebrated Riemann-Hilbert correspondence of Kashiwara and Mebkhout, which supplies a fully faithful embedding from the category of perverse sheaves on $X$ to the category of algebraic $\mathfrak{D}_X$-modules. This embedding is transcendental in nature: that is, it depends essentially on the (archimedean) topology of the field of complex numbers. It is natural to ask if there is some counterpart of the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence over nonarchimedean fields, such as the field $\mathbf{Q}_p$ of $p$-adic rational numbers. In this series of lectures, I will survey some of what is known about this question and describe some recent progress, using tools from the theory of prismatic cohomology (joint work with Bhargav Bhatt).