The acyclic group dichotomy

Our main result provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a finitelygenerated subgroup of GLn(C), n > 0, to have finite virtual cohomological dimension. A group has finite virtual cohomological dimension (VCD) if it has a subgroup of finite index which has finite cohomological dimension; this dimension is, in fact, the same for all torsion-free subgroups of finite index. It is, of course, necessary for a group r with VCD(T) Q), is independent of the choice of solvable series; thus, for a polycyclic group r, h(T) is the number of infinite factors in a normal series with cyclic quotients. We announce our main result.

Our main result provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a finitelygenerated subgroup of GLn(C), n > 0, to have finite virtual cohomological dimension. A group has finite virtual cohomological dimension (VCD) if it has a subgroup of finite index which has finite cohomological dimension; this dimension is, in fact, the same for all torsion-free subgroups of finite index. It is, of course, necessary for a group r with VCD(T) Q), is independent of the choice of solvable series; thus, for a polycyclic group r, h(T) is the number of infinite factors in a normal series with cyclic quotients. We announce our main result.

A profinite group G is said to have cohomological dimension at most n if Hr (G, A) is zero for all r > n and all discrete Z-torsion G-modules A. The groups of co omological dimension at most 1 are just the projective groups. Among other important groups which have finite cohomological dimension are the torsion-free profinite groups of finite rank and certain Galois groups Gal (K/k), where K is either a separable closure of k or the subfield of a separable closure generated by all finite Galois extensions of p-power degree.

We discuss two classes of acyclic groups that are commutator subgroups of finitely presented groups with infinite cyclic abelianization. The first is algebraic and includes groups first exhibited by Baumslag and Gruenberg, of which it is shown that Epstein’s acyclic group is as pecial case. The second class is geometric, and is shown to include a number of wild arc groups in the literature.

On groups of finite cohomological dimension

We discuss the question of whether the global dimension is a monoidal invariant for Hopf algebras, in the sense that if two Hopf algebras have equivalent monoidal categories of comodules, then their global dimensions should be equal. We provide several positive new answers to this question, under various assumptions of smoothness, cosemisimplicity or finite dimension. We also discuss the comparison between the global dimension and the Gerstenhaber–Schack cohomological dimension in the cosemisimple case, obtaining equality in the case the latter is finite. One of our main tools is the new concept of twisted separable functor.

For groups with a uniform bound on the length of chains of finite subgroups, we study the relationship between the Bredon cohomological dimension for proper actions and the notions of cohomological dimension one obtains by restricting the coefficients of Bredon cohomology to (cohomological) Mackey functors or fixed point functors. We also investigate the closure properties of the class of groups with finite Bredon cohomological dimension for Mackey functors.

On certain rings of differentiable type and finiteness properties of local cohomology

In their 1988 paper ‘Gluing of perverse sheaves and discrete series representations’, D. Kazhdan and G. Laumon constructed an abelian category $\mathcal{A}$ associated to a reductive group G over a finite field with the aim of using it to construct discrete series representations of the finite Chevalley group $G(\mathbb{F}_q)$ . The well-definedness of their construction depended on their conjecture that this category has finite cohomological dimension. This was disproved in 2001 by R. Bezrukavnikov and A. Polishchuk, who found a counterexample in the case $G = SL_3$ . Polishchuk then made an alternative conjecture: though this counterexample shows that the Grothendieck group $K_0(\mathcal{A})$ is not spanned by objects of finite projective dimension, he noted that a graded version of $K_0(\mathcal{A})$ can be thought of as a module over Laurent polynomials and conjectured that a certain localization of this module is generated by objects of finite projective dimension, and suggested that this conjecture could lead toward a proof that Kazhdan and Laumon’s construction is well defined. He proved this conjecture in Types $A_1, A_2, A_3$ , and $B_2$ . In the present paper, we prove Polishchuk’s conjecture for all types, and prove that Kazhdan and Laumon’s construction is indeed well defined, giving a new geometric construction of discrete series representations of $G(\mathbb{F}_q)$ .

Cohomological dimension and acyclic resolutions

The setting is sheaves of modules over a commutative ring L L . It is shown that on completely metrizable spaces certain sheaves having mutually isomorphic finitely generated stalks are locally constant over a dense open subset. This is used to show that a locally compact metrizable space X X that is homologically locally connected with respect to a principal ideal domain L L is a homology manifold over L L provided it has finite cohomological dimension with respect to L L and, for any two points x , y ∈ X x,y \in X , the modules H k ( X , X − { x } ; L ) {H_k}(X,X - \{ x\} ;L) and H k ( X , X − { y } ; L ) {H_k}(X,X - \{ y\} ;L) are isomorphic and finitely generated.

We consider Voevodsky's slice tower for a finite spectrum \mathcal E in the motivic stable homotopy category over a perfect field k . In case k has finite cohomological dimension, we show that the slice tower converges, in that the induced filtration on the bi-graded homotopy sheaves \Pi_{a,b}f_n\mathcal E is finite, exhaustive and separated at each stalk (after inverting the exponential characteristic of k ). This partially verifies a conjecture of Voevodsky.

When is group cohomology finitary?

Let $G$ be an infinite discrete group. A classifying space for proper actions\nof $G$ is a proper $G$-CW-complex $X$ such that the fixed point sets $X^H$ are\ncontractible for all finite subgroups $H$ of $G$. In this paper we consider the\nstable analogue of the classifying space for proper actions in the category of\nproper $G$-spectra and study its finiteness properties. We investigate when $G$\nadmits a stable classifying space for proper actions that is finite or of\nfinite type and relate these conditions to the compactness of the sphere\nspectrum in the homotopy category of proper $G$-spectra and to classical\nfiniteness properties of the Weyl groups of finite subgroups of $G$. Finally,\nif the group $G$ is virtually torsion-free we also show that the smallest\npossible dimension of a stable classifying space for proper actions coincides\nwith the virtual cohomological dimension of $G$, thus providing the first\ngeometric interpretation of the virtual cohomological dimension of a group.\n

Homological finiteness properties of Lie algebras