Geometry and arithmetic cycles attached to \(\mathrm{SL}_3(\mathbb{Z})\). I (Q1073830)

The object of this paper is to study the homology and cohomology groups of spaces \(\Gamma\setminus X\) where \(\Gamma\) is a torsion-free subgroup of \(\mathrm{SL}_3({\mathbb{Z}})\) of finite index and \(X\) is the symmetric space associated with \(\mathrm{SL}_3(\mathbb{R})\). Then \(X\) is 5-dimensional and \(\Gamma\setminus X\) is not compact but it has a natural Borel-Serre compactification \(\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}\) which is a compact manifold with boundary \(\partial (\Gamma \setminus X)\). The authors investigate \(H_2(\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}, \partial (\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}), \mathbb{C})\) using hyperbolic cycles associated with subgroups of the type \(\mathrm{SO}(b)\) where \(b\) is a ternary rational quadratic form of signature \((2,1)\) which does not represent \(0\). The authors also construct a family of 3 cycles which are closely related to these and by evaluating the intersection numbers they show that in the case of principal congruence subgroups the hyperbolic cycles often represent non-trivial elements of \(H_2(\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}, \partial (\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}), \mathbb{C})\); they use this to find elements of \(H^2(\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}, \mathbb{C})\) which give a non-trivial contribution to \(H^2_{\text{cusp}}(\overline{\Gamma \setminus X}, \mathbb{C})\).