Stability and instability of lattices in semisimple groups (Q6142980)

Let \(\Gamma\) be a group and \(\mathfrak{g}=(G_{n},d_{n})_{n=1}^{\infty}\) a family of groups \(G_{n}\) equipped with biinvariant metrics \(d_{n}\). An asymptotic homomorphism \(\varphi=\{\varphi_{n}\}_{n=1}^{\infty}\) from \(\Gamma\) to \(\mathfrak{g}\) is a family of maps \(\varphi_{n}: \Gamma \rightarrow G_{n}\) such that for every \(x,y \in \Gamma\), \(\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} d_{n}(\varphi_{n}(x)\varphi_{n}(y)), \varphi_{n}(xy))=0\). The group \(\Gamma\) is \(\mathfrak{g}\)-stable if for every asymptotic homomorphism \(\varphi=\{\varphi_{n}\}_{n=1}^{\infty}\) there exists a homomorphism \(\psi=\{\psi_{n}\}_{n=1}^{\infty}\), such that for every \(n \in \mathbb{N}\), \(\psi_{n}: \Gamma \rightarrow G_{n}\) is a homomorphism and for every \(x \in \Gamma\), \(\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}d_{n}(\psi_{n}(x),\varphi_{n}(x))\). One of the motivations to study stability is that it provides a path to prove \(\mathfrak{g}\)-inapproximability which has been a major open problem for various \(\mathfrak{g}\)'s, but was solved for some \(\mathfrak{g}\)'s using stability (see [\textit{M. De Chiffre} et al., Forum Math. Sigma 8, Paper No. e18, 37 p. (2020; Zbl 1456.22002)]). In the paper under review the authors study the family of unitary groups \(\mathfrak{g}=\{ U_{n}(\mathbb{C})\}_{n=1}^{\infty}\) with two different norms: the Frobenius norm (the \(L^{2}\)-norm), i.e., for \(A \in M_{n}(\mathbb{C})\), \(||A||_{F}=\mathrm{tr}(A^{\ast}A)\) and the operator norm (the \(L^{\infty}\)-norm), i.e., for \(A \in M_{n}(\mathbb{C})\), \(||A||_{\mathrm{op}}=\sup \{ || Av || \mid v \in \mathbb{C}^{n}, \, ||v|=1 \}\). In this paper the authors show that higher-rank lattices behave very differently with respect to these two metrics. The main result is the following dichotomy: ``almost all'' (and conjecturally all) such lattices are Frobenius stable but at the same time are operator instable.