Chromatic Euler characteristics and duality for infinite groups

Abstract

We study a family of generalizations of the notion of Euler characteristic of discrete groups (or of orbifolds, depending on one's perspective) indexed on the natural numbers. For $n=0$, this is the classical orbifold Euler characteristic as studied by Wall and Serre, whereas for $n \geq 1$ and finite groups, this is the chromatic cardinality as studied by Ben-Moshe--Carmeli--Schlank--Yanovski. For general $n$, we show that our generalized Euler characteristic admits a natural interpretation in terms of the Morava $E$-theories. Our work involves showing that the generalized cohomology of infinite groups $G$ with finite universal space for proper actions $\underline{E}G$ has a good theory of duality, as expressed by a new duality functor on the category of proper $G$-equivariant spectra. In particular, for such groups we prove the vanishing of Klein's generalized Farrell--Tate cohomology with $T(n)$-local coefficients. We compute our generalized orbifold Euler characteristics in a large number of examples. This includes many mapping class groups, where the classical calculation is a result of Harer--Zagier, and many arithmetic groups, whose classical orbifold Euler characteristics were computed by Harder.