Manifolds counting and class field towers (Q411635)

Let \(H\) be a noncompact simple Lie group endowed with a fixed Haar measure, let \(K\) denote a maximal compact subgroup of \(H\) and let \(X=H/K\) be the associated symmetric space. Let \(L_H(x)\) denote the number of conjugacy classes of lattices in \(H\) of covolume at most \(x\). This paper is devoted to the study of \(L_H(x)\) for groups \(H\) of real rank at least two. By Margulis' arithmeticity theorem, every lattice \(\Gamma\) in \(H\) is arithmetic. Serre conjectured that for all lattices \(\Gamma\) in such \(H\), \(\Gamma\) has the congruence subgroup property (CSP). Here it is proved that \(L_H(x) \geq x^{a \log(x)}\) for a positive \(a\in \mathbb R\). Assuming the CSP and the Margulis-Platonov conjecture there exists a positive constant \(b\) such that \(L_H(x) \leq x^{a \log(x)}\). The authors show that the main contribution to the growth of uniform lattices in \(H\) does not come from the subgroups of a single lattice, but from a ``diagonal counting'' when they run through different arithmetic groups \(\Gamma_i\) defined over number fields \(k_i\) of different degrees \(d_i\) and for each \(\Gamma_i\) they count some of its subgroups.