Applications of some zeta functions in group theory. (Q2918501)

Several growth functions were introduced in group theory, giving rise to Dirichlet series which sometimes can be regarded as natural generalizations of number theoretic zeta functions. In particular some Dirichlet series encoding maximal subgroup growth and representation growth have diverse applications and can be used to solve various seemingly unrelated problems. These involve random generation, random walks and properties of word maps and commutator maps in particular.NEWLINENEWLINE This is a survey paper on these topics but contains also some new results and conjectures. For example the author proves that there is an absolute constant \(c\) such that for any almost simple group \(G\) and any \(n\in\mathbb N\), we have that the number \(m_n(G)\) of maximal subgroups of index \(n\) in \(G\) is at most \(cn(\log n)^3\). The second new result deals with analogues of Ore's conjecture for some \(p\)-adic groups. Fix \(d=2,3\) and for a prime \(p\) let \(m_p\) denote the Haar measure of the set of commutators in \(\mathrm{SL}_d(\mathbb Z_p)\); then \(m_p\to 1\) as \(p\to\infty\). It would be interesting to find out whether we actually have \(m_p=1\) in the previous result. The author proposes the following conjecture: let \(d\geq 2\) be an integer, \(p\) a prime, and if \(d=2\) suppose \(p>3\). Then every element of \(\mathrm{SL}_d(\mathbb Z_p)\) is a commutator.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 1242.11004].