Weakly Commensurable Arithmetic Groups and Isospectral Locally Symmetric Spaces
| Members Seminar | |
| Topic: | Weakly Commensurable Arithmetic Groups and Isospectral Locally Symmetric Spaces |
| Speaker: | Gopal Prasad |
| Affiliation: | University of Michigan; Member, School of Mathematics |
| Date: | Monday, February 27 |
| Time/Room: | 2:00pm - 3:00pm/S-101 |
Andrei Rapinchuk and I have introduced a new notion of ``weak-commensurability of subgroups of two semi-simple groups. We have shown that existence of weakly-commensurable Zariski-dense subgroups in semi-simple groups G_1 and G_2 lead to strong relationship between G_1 and G_2. The key to understanding this is the existence of regular semi-simple elements in Zariski-dense subgroups with prescribed ``local behavior proved by us earlier. Our results on weakly-commensurable arithmetic groups lead to a solution of the well-known problem ``Can one hear the shape of a drum? for arithmetic compact locally symmetric spaces. I will describe some of our results and outline the techniques used to prove them.