English

Statistics of subgroups of the modular group

Group Theory 2022-01-03 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We count the finitely generated subgroups of the modular group PSL(2,Z)\textsf{PSL}(2,\mathbb{Z}). More precisely: each such subgroup HH can be represented by its Stallings graph Γ(H)\Gamma(H), we consider the number of vertices of Γ(H)\Gamma(H) to be the size of HH and we count the subgroups of size nn. Since an index nn subgroup has size nn, our results generalize the known results on the enumeration of the finite index subgroups of PSL(2,Z)\textsf{PSL}(2,\mathbb{Z}). We give asymptotic equivalents for the number of finitely generated subgroups of PSL(2,Z)\textsf{PSL}(2,\mathbb{Z}), as well as of the number of finite index subgroups, free subgroups and free finite index subgroups. We also give the expected value of the isomorphism type of a size nn subgroup and prove a large deviations statement concerning this value. Similar results are proved for finite index and for free subgroups. Finally, we show how to efficiently generate uniformly at random a size nn subgroup (resp. finite index subgroup, free subgroup) of PSL(2,Z)\textsf{PSL}(2,\mathbb{Z}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.00437,
  title  = {Statistics of subgroups of the modular group},
  author = {Frédérique Bassino and Cyril Nicaud and Pascal Weil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.00437},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

62 pages. Typos fixed. Lemma 2.8, which was not correct as stated, has been reworked