New Kazhdan groups (Q1573698)

The locally compact groups which are nowadays referred to as Kazhdan groups have been introduced in 1967 by Kazhdan as those locally compact groups \(G\) for which the trivial 1-dimensional representation of \(G\) forms an isolated point in the dual space \(\widehat G\) of \(G\). At least for second countable \(G\) this condition is equivalent to that, for any unitary representation \(\pi\) of \(G\), the first continuous cohomology group \(H^1(G, \pi)\) is trivial. Kazhdan groups have since attracted a lot of attention and turned out to be important in several areas of mathematics, e.g. geometry and harmonic analysis. The purpose of the paper is to find Kazhdan groups among automorphism groups associated to hyperbolic buildings. The main result is the following theorem. Let \(X\) be an \(n\)-dimensional building of thickness \(q+1\) associated to a cocompact hyperbolic group with a simplex as its fundamental domain. Let \(G\) be a unimodular subgroup of the simplicial automorphism group and suppose that \(G\) is closed in the compact open topology and acts cocompactly on \(X\). Then, for \(1\leq k\leq n-1\) and \(q\) sufficiently large, \(H^k(G,\pi) =0\) for every unitary representation \(\pi\). In particular, this leads to new families of Kazhdan groups in dimensions 3 and 4, arising from Kac-Moody buildings. An important tool used is Garland's method to establish the vanishing of cohomology groups of simplicial complexes.