On growth of systole along congruence coverings of Hilbert modular varieties (Q2409805)

The systole \(\text{sys}_1 (M)\) of a Riemannian manifold \(M\) is the least length of a noncontractible closed geodesic in \(M\). The first explicit examples of surfaces with systole growing logarithmically with the genus using a sequence of principal congruence coverings of an arithmetic compact Riemann surface were constructed by \textit{P. Buser} and \textit{P. Sarnak} [Invent. Math. 117, No. 1, 27--56 (1994; Zbl 0814.14033)]. Such sequences of surfaces \(\{ S_p \}\) satisfy the inequality \[ \operatorname{sys}_1 (S_p) \geq \frac {4}{3} \log (g (S_p)) - c , \] where \(g(S_p)\) is the genus of \(S_p\) and \(c\) is a constant independent of \(p\). This paper is concerned with generalizing the construction of Buser and Sarnak to Hilbert modular varieties. Indeed, given a Hilbert modular variety \(M_k\) of dimension \(2n\) over a number field \(k\), the author proves that the sequence of principal congruence coverings \(M_I\) eventually satisfies \[ \operatorname{sys}_1 (M_I) \geq \frac {4}{3 \sqrt{n}} \log (\operatorname{vol} (M_I)) - c \] for some constant \(c\) independent of \(M_I\).