The Nonexistence of Certain Representations of the Absolute Galois Group of Quadratic Fields

For a quadratic field K, we investigate continuous mod p representations of the absolute Galois groups of K that are unramified away from p and infinity. We prove that for certain pairs (K,p), there are no such irreducible representations. We also list some imaginary quadratic fields for which such irreducible representations exist. As an application, we look at elliptic curves with good reduction away from 2 over quadratic fields.