English

Finding generators and relations for groups acting on the hyperbolic ball

Group Theory 2017-01-11 v1

Abstract

In order to enumerate the fake projective planes, as announced in~\cite{CS}, we found explicit generators and a presentation for each maximal arithmetic subgroup Γˉ\bar\Gamma of~PU(2,1)PU(2,1) for which the (appropriately normalized) covolume equals~1/N1/N for some integer~N1N\ge1. Prasad and Yeung \cite{PY1,PY2} had given a list of all such Γˉ\bar\Gamma (up to equivalence). The generators were found by a computer search which uses the natural action of PU(2,1)PU(2,1) on the unit ball B(\C2)B(\C^2) in~\C2\C^2. Our main results here give criteria which ensure that the computer search has found sufficiently many elements of~Γˉ\bar\Gamma to generate Γˉ\bar\Gamma, and describes a family of relations amongst the generating set sufficient to give a presentation of~Γˉ\bar\Gamma. We give an example illustrating details of how this was done in the case of a particular~Γˉ\bar\Gamma (for which N=864N=864). While there are no fake projective planes in this case, we exhibit a torsion-free subgroup~Π\Pi of index~NN in~Γˉ\bar\Gamma, and give some properties of the surface~Π\B(\C2)\Pi\backslash B(\C^2).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.02452,
  title  = {Finding generators and relations for groups acting on the hyperbolic ball},
  author = {Donald I. Cartwright and Tim Steger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.02452},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:45:36.432Z