Galois deformation rings and modularity in the residually reducible case

We prove some residually reducible p-adic Galois representations of number fields arise from modular forms. We study the universal deformation ring arising from deformations satisfying the Fontaine–Laffaille condition at primes over p. Under certain conditions, we establish the reduced universal deformation ring is a discrete valuation ring. The method uses pseudocharacters and certain bounds on Selmer groups, where the ideal of reducibility as defined by Bellaïche and Chenevier is shown to be maximal and principal. A self-dual assumption is not needed in our argument. The main result on deformations applies to n-dimensional representations. In applications, a congruence between Hermitian modular forms due to Klosin is used with our results to prove modularity of some four-dimensional p-adic representations of the imaginary quadratic field [Formula: see text].