Mumford coverings of the projective line (Q1396717)

In a famous paper of 1987 [in: Number theory, Semin. New York 1984/85, Lect. Notes Math. 1240, 165--195 (1987; Zbl 0627.12015)], \textit{D. Harbater} proved that any finite group \(G\) can be realized as the Galois group of a finite normal covering of the projective line over a given complete non-Archimedean field \(K\). The present authors show that if \(\text{char}(K)= 0\), the covering curve can be chosen to be a Mumford curve. If, however, \(\text{char}(K)= p>0\), the authors find a necessary and sufficient condition for \(G\) to be realizable in the above sense. -- The first part of the proof is close to \textit{Q. Liu}'s proof of Harbater's theorem [in: Recent developments in the inverse Galois problem, Joint Summer Res. Conf., Univ. Washington 1993, Contemp. Math. 186, 261--265 (1995; Zbl 0834.12004)]. For the second part, the authors describe the uniformization of the Mumford curves involved. Note that the characteristic 0 result was independently obtained by \textit{P. E. Bradley} in his Ph.D. thesis [``\(p\)-adische Hurwitzräume'', Diss. (Karlsruhe 2002)] using the reviewer's characterization of discontinuous subgroups of \(\text{PGL}_2(K)\) [\textit{F. Herrlich}, Arch. Math. 39, 204--216 (1982; Zbl 0466.14007)].