Cohomology of classifying spaces of central quotients of rank two Kac-Moody groups (Q2501409)

The goal of this paper is to compute the mop \(p\) cohomology algebra as a module over the Steenrod algebra along with all higher Bockstein differentials of the classifying spaces of quotients of non-affine Kac-Moody groups of rank two by finite central \(p\)-groups. It follows from the homotopy decomposition results in the third author's MIT thesis that these classifying spaces can be obtained as homotopy pushouts of diagrams of the form \(BH \leftarrow BT \rightarrow BH'\), where \(T\) is the \(2\)-torus, and \(H\) and \(H'\) are two rank \(2\) compact Lie groups. The authors then more generally study the class of spaces which arise from such homotopy pushouts. For actually computing the mod \(p\) cohomology the authors switch to the \(p\)-completed category, where the relevant pushout data can be encoded in terms of \(p\)-adic representation theory of the infinite dihedral group along with some additional twisting data. This encoding process eventually yields a complete classification of the class of pushouts under investigation. The authors then efficiently use the Mayer-Vietoris sequence to compute the mod \(p\) cohomology in the various cases. In particular, they derive complete information in almost all the cases, where the pushout corresponds to a \(p\)-completed classifying space of a central quotient of the above sort.