Volumes of hyperbolic manifolds (Q1066287)

The set of volumes of hyperbolic 3-manifolds is a closed well-ordered (nondiscrete) subset of \(\mathbb R^+\) [see \textit{W. Thurston}, ''The geometry and topology of three-manifolds'', mimeographed notes, Princeton Univ., Princeton 1980]. The main result of this paper is that the set of covolumes of discrete arithmetic irreducible subgroups of the family of groups \((\mathrm{PGL}(2,\mathbb R))^a\times (\mathrm{PGL}(2,\mathbb C))^b\), \(a+b\geq 1\), is a discrete set. In fact, somewhat more is proved. Let \(g(\Gamma)\) be the largest number such that \(\text{covolume}(\Gamma')\) is an integer multiple of \(g(\Gamma)\) whenever \(\Gamma'\) is commensurable with \(\Gamma\). It is shown that the set of \(g(\Gamma)\)'s, \(\Gamma\) ranging over the same set of groups as above, is a discrete set. The result is proved by use of an explicit number-theoretic formula for \(g(\Gamma)\) due to \textit{A. Borel} [Ann. Sc. Norm. Super. Pisa, Cl. Sci., IV. Ser. 8, 1--33 (1981; Zbl 0473.57003)]. The author uses this to reduce the problem to one of studying a quantity involving \(d_K\), \(h_K\), \(\zeta_K(2)\), \(r_1\), \(r_2\), where \(K\) is a number field and the above are the discriminant, class number, zeta function at 2, and the number of real and complex embeddings of \(K\), respectively. he then uses known lower bounds for the regulator and discriminant to prove the theorem.