English

Bounding the covolume of lattices in products

Group Theory 2019-10-30 v3

Abstract

We study lattices in a product G=G1××GnG = G_1 \times \dots \times G_n of non-discrete, compactly generated, totally disconnected locally compact (tdlc) groups. We assume that each factor is quasi just-non-compact, meaning that GiG_i is non-compact and every closed normal subgroup of GiG_i is discrete or cocompact (e.g. GiG_i is topologically simple). We show that the set of discrete subgroups of GG containing a fixed cocompact lattice Γ\Gamma with dense projections is finite. The same result holds if Γ\Gamma is non-uniform, provided GG has Kazhdan's property (T). We show that for any compact subset KGK \subset G, the collection of discrete subgroups ΓG\Gamma \leq G with G=ΓKG = \Gamma K and dense projections is uniformly discrete, hence of covolume bounded away from 00. When the ambient group GG is compactly presented, we show in addition that the collection of those lattices falls into finitely many Aut(G)Aut(G)-orbits. As an application, we establish finiteness results for discrete groups acting on products of locally finite graphs with semiprimitive local action on each factor. We also present several intermediate results of independent interest. Notably it is shown that if a non-discrete, compactly generated quasi just-non-compact tdlc group GG is a Chabauty limit of discrete subgroups, then some compact open subgroup of GG is an infinitely generated pro-pp group for some prime pp. It is also shown that in any Kazhdan group with discrete amenable radical, the lattices form an open subset of the Chabauty space of closed subgroups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.04469,
  title  = {Bounding the covolume of lattices in products},
  author = {Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace and Adrien Le Boudec},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04469},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

v1: 51 pages. v2: 52 pages. v3: final version