Cohomology of special unitary groups and congruence subgroups

We prove a homotopy invariance result for the first cohomology group of the special unitary group $\mathrm{SU}_3(F[t])$ with coefficients in irreducible representations of $\mathrm{PGL}_2(F)$. The main theorem establishes that this cohomology is naturally isomorphic to the corresponding cohomology of $\mathrm{PGL}_2(F)$.