Commutators of congruence subgroups in the arithmetic case (Q2202819)

Over the last decade, the author and his collaborators have proved a plethora of results on commutators of relative elementary subgroups in increasingly general situations. There have been surveys by the author himself which can be consulted with the state of the art. In this paper, the author proves mainly the following result which can be regarded as a generalization of Bass-Milnor-Serre's classical result on the congruence subgroup problem. Consider \(O_S\), the ring of \(S\)-integers in a number field such that \(O_S^{\ast}\) is infinite. Let \(I,J\) be ideals in \(O_S\) and \(n\geq 3\). Denote by \(E(n,I)\) the subgroup of GL\((n,O_S)\) generated by elementary transvections \(t_{ij}(a)\) with \(a \in I\) and \(i \neq j\). If \(E(n,O_S, I)\) denotes the normal closure of \(E(n,I)\) in GL\((n,O_S)\), then \[[E(n,I), E(n,J)] = [E(n,O_S,I), E(n,O_S,J)] = E(n, O_S, IJ).\] For the proof, apart from using many of his earlier results, the author (proves here and) uses expressions of commutators in terms of some special commutators a la van der Kallen. True to his usual style, he also proposes at the end some problems for investigation in this direction.