Kazhdan's Property (T) for Linear Groups Over General Rings
| LIE GROUPS, REPRESENTATIONS AND DISCRETE MATH | |
| Topic: | Kazhdan's Property (T) for Linear Groups Over General Rings |
| Speaker: | Yehuda Shalom |
| Affiliation: | IAS |
| Date: | Tuesday, March 21 |
| Time/Room: | 11:30am - 12:30pm/S-101 |
We will discuss the following very recent result:
Theorem. Let R be any finitely generated associative (not necessarily commutative) ring, with 1. Then for any n > stable range rank of the ring R, the group EL_n(R) has Kazhdan's property (T).
The group EL_n(R) is the group generated by the elementary subgroups of GL_n(R) (when R is not commutative, SL_n(R) doesn't even make sense). Special important cases of the theorem are that SL_n(Z[x]) has (T) for n >3, SL_n(Z[x,y]) has (T) for n >4 etc. The proof is cohomological, and doesn't give any explicit Kazhdan constants. We will discuss it in a very friendly manner, leaving out some "black boxes" and assuming no prior familiarity with property (T).