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Event

Alex Lubotzky, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Friday, September 20, 2019 16:00to17:00
Burnside Hall Room 1104, 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0B9, CA

Title: Groups' approximation, stability and high dimensional expanders

Abstract: Several well-known open questions (such as: are all groups sofic or hyperlinear?) have a common form: can all groups be approximated by asymptotic homomorphisms into the symmetric groups Sym(n) (in the sofic case) or the  unitary groups U(n) (in the hyperlinear case)?  In the case of U(n), the question can be asked with respect to different metrics and norms. We answer, for the first time, some of these versions, showing that there exist finitely presented groups which are not approximated by U(n) with respect to the Frobenius (=L_2)norm.   The strategy is via the notion of "stability": some higher dimensional  cohomology vanishing phenomena is proven to imply stability  and using   higher dimensional expanders, it is shown that some non-residually finite groups (central extensions of some lattices in p-adic Lie groups)  are Frobenious stable and hence cannot be Frobenius approximated. 

All notions will be explained.  Based on joint works with M, De Chiffre, L. Glebsky and A. Thom and with I. Oppenheim. 

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