Nonarithmetic hyperbolic manifolds and trace rings (Q1713064)

Lattices of semisimple Lie groups give rise to locally symmetric spaces of finite volume. One particularly important class consists of hyperbolic manifolds of finite volume. The most natural construction of lattices comes from arithmetic subgroups such as \(\mathrm{SL}(n, \mathbb{Z})\). When the rank of the semisimple Lie group is greater than or equal to 2, the celebrated theorem of Margulis shows that all lattices are arithmetic. On the other hand, there are non-arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds. This is easy in the case of hyperbolic surfaces, i.e., \(n=2\) for the semisimple Lie group \(\mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{R})\). For all \(n\), there is a general construction of nonarithmetic hyperbolic manifolds due to Gromov and Piatetski-Shapiro, which is obtained by cutting and gluing two hyperbolic manifolds along a common totally geodesic submanifold. There is one generalization by Belolipetsky and Thomson which is obtained by cutting along two totally geodesic hypersurfaces in a hyperbolic manifold and then glue them together. By improving the method of Belolipetsky-Thomson, the author of this paper gives a sufficient condition on the hyperplanes used in the construction to obtain nonarithmetic manifolds. As a consequence, infinitely many examples of such manifolds that are pairwise noncommensurable are constructed and their volumes are estimated. These results go much beyond the earlier results.