A Semistable Model for the Tower of Modular Cures

The usual Katz-Mazur model for the modular curve $X(p^n)$ has horribly singular reduction. For large n there isn't any model of $X(p^n)$ which has good reduction, but after extending the base one can at least find a semistable model, which means that the special fiber only has normal crossings as singularities. We will reveal a new picture of the special fiber of a semistable model of the entire tower of modular curves. We will also indicate why this problem is important from the point of view of the local Langlands correspondence for $GL(2)$ .