Counting overlattices in automorphism groups of trees. (Q2498408)

The Kazhdan-Margulis Lemma says that there exists a positive lower bound for the covolume of co-compact lattices in connected semi-simple Lie groups. This is no longer true in the case of lattices in the group of automorphisms of a locally finite tree. In this case there are examples of infinite increasing sequences of lattices whose co-volume tends to \(0\). However for a co-compact lattice \(\Gamma\) in the group \(\Aut(T)\) of automorphisms of a locally finite tree \(T\), there is only a finite number \(u_\Gamma(n)\) of lattices \(\Gamma'\) containing \(\Gamma\) as a subgroup of a fixed index \(n\). Thus it is natural to ask what is the asymptotic behavior of \(u_\Gamma(n)\) as \(n\) tends to \(\infty\). This question was first raised by Bass and Lubotzky. The paper under review contains two results: it provides an upper bound of \(u_\Gamma(n)\) for any co-compact lattice \(\Gamma\) in \(\Aut(T)\), and it computes a lower bound of \(u_\Gamma(n)\) for a specific lattice in the automorphism group of a \(2p\)-regular tree.