Descent for Shimura varieties (Q1590934)

In his Corvallis conference paper, \textit{R. P. Langlands} [Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 33, 205-246 (1979; Zbl 0447.12009)] stated a conjecture that identifies the conjugate of a Shimura variety by an automorphism of \(\mathbb C\) with the Shimura variety defined by different data, and he sketched a proof that his conjecture implies the existence of canonical models. It is not obvious, however, that the descent maps defined by Langlands satisfy the continuity condition necessary for the descent to be effective. In this paper, the author proves that they do satisfy this condition and therefore that the Langlands conjecture does imply the existence of canonical models.