No label defined (Q4948717)

A locally compact group \(G\) is said to have Kazhdan's property (T) if the trivial one-dimensional representation of \(G\) forms an isolated point in the dual space \(\widehat G\) of \(G\). Property \((T)\) was introduced by Kazhdan in 1967 and has since been investigated by numerous authors and proved to have significant applications in various branches of mathematics, like operator algebras and geometry. Quite a lot is now known about which locally compact groups share property \((T)\). Notably, every simple Lie group of real rank \(\geq 2\) has property \((T)\), and a main step in establishing this is the case of \(SL(3,\mathbb{R})\). Adding to the different existing proofs, in the paper under review the authors present a fairly elementary proof for the fact that \(SL(3,k)\) has property \((T)\) for any local field \(k\) (Theorem 2.6). In fact, neither Mackey's theory nor estimates for coefficient functions of unitary representations are used. It is known that, for a connected Lie group \(G\), property \((T)\) can also be expressed in terms of Kazhdan constants related to the Laplacian \(\Delta=-(X^2_1 +\cdots+ X^2_n)\) associated to a basis \(X_1,\dots, X_n\) of the Lie algebra of \(G\). The second purpose of the paper is to improve this as follows. For any unitary representation \(\pi\) of \(G\) in a Hilbert space \({\mathcal H}\), let \(d\pi\) denote the derived representation in the space \({\mathcal H}^\infty\) of \(C^\infty\)-vectors in \({\mathcal H} \). Fix a compact subgroup \(K\) of \(G\), and for any \((\pi,{\mathcal H})\) and \(\sigma \in \widehat K\), let \({\mathcal H}(\sigma)\) denote the \(K\)-isotypic component of \((\pi \mid K,{\mathcal H})\) corresponding to \(\sigma\). Let \({\mathcal H}^\infty_K\) be the algebraic direct sum of all \({\mathcal H}(\sigma) \cap{\mathcal H}^\infty\), \(\sigma \in \widehat K\). Then \(G\) has property \((T)\) if and only if there exists a constant \(\varepsilon >0\) such that \[ \kappa_K \bigl(d\pi (\Delta), G\bigr)= \inf \biggl\{\bigl\langle d\pi(\Delta) \xi,\xi\bigr \rangle:\xi\in{\mathcal H}^\infty_K, \|\xi \|=1 \biggr\}\geq\varepsilon \] for every representation \((\pi,{\mathcal H})\) without nonzero fixed vector (Theorem 1.1). The improvement is that the space \({\mathcal H}^\infty_K\) is considerably smaller than \({\mathcal H}^\infty \). Define the infinitesimal Kazhdan constant \(\kappa_K(\Delta,G)\) to be the least upper bound of all \(\kappa_K (d\pi (\Delta),G)\), where \(\pi\) ranges through all representations which do not contain the trivial representation. Finally, an explicit bound is computed for this Kazhdan constant in the case of \(SL(3,\mathbb{R})\) (Theorem 1.2).