Nilpotent Lie algebras and systolic growth of nilmanifolds

Abstract

Introduced by Gromov in the nineties, the systolic growth of a Lie group gives the smallest possible covolume of a lattice with a given systole. In a simply connected nilpotent Lie group, this function has polynomial growth, but can grow faster than the volume growth. We express this systolic growth function in terms of discrete cocompact subrings of the Lie algebra, making it more practical to estimate. After providing some general upper bounds, we develop methods to provide nontrivial lower bounds. We provide the first computations of the asymptotics of the systolic growth of nilpotent groups for which this is not equivalent to the volume growth. In particular, we provide an example for which the degree of growth is not an integer; it has dimension 7. Finally, we gather some open questions.