arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Margherita Piccolo.
We study the virtually generating graph of pro-$p$ groups. We show that various classes of pro-$p$ groups have connected virtually generating graph and we bound its diameter in these cases; e.g.\ compact subgroups of analytic groups over local fields and the Nottingham group.
The representation zeta function of a profinite group $G$ encodes the distribution of continuous irreducible complex representations of $G$ as a function of the dimension. Its abscissa of convergence $α(G)$ describes the polynomial degree of representation growth of $G$. Within the class of quasi-semisimple profinite groups, we characterise those of polynomial representation growth (PRG) and we prove that whether such a group $G$ has PRG or not only depends on its semisimple part $G/\mathrm{Z}(G)$. Moreover, we show that, for quasi-semisimple profinite groups $G$ that have uniformly bounded Lie ranks, the degree of growth satisfies $α(G) = α(G/\mathrm{Z}(G))$. We provide a technique to produce, for any prescribed positive real number $\varrho$, quasi-semisimple profinite groups $G$ with PRG of degree $α(G) = \varrho$. Our method allows for considerable flexibility regarding the inclusion of finite simple groups of Lie type as composition factors of $G$. Furthermore, we can arrange for the groups $G$ of prescribed representation growth to be profinite completions of suitable finitely generated discrete groups $Γ$ so that the group $Γ$ has the same representation zeta function as $G$.
We consider the representation growth of split extensions of $SL_2^m(O)$. We prove that the corresponding representation zeta functions factor as a product of the representation zeta function of $SL_2^m(O)$ and the relative representation zeta function associated to the extension. We make use of our result by computing the zeta functions for two infinite families of split extensions of $SL_2^m(O)$ explicitly. Along the way, we compute the representation zeta functions of a large class of subgroups of $SL_2^m(O)$.
For fixed $q\in\{3,7,11,19, 43,67,163\}$, we consider the density of primes $p$ congruent to $1$ modulo $4$ such that the class group of the number field $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-qp})$ has order divisible by $16$. We show that this density is equal to $1/8$, in line with a more general conjecture of Gerth. Vinogradov's method is the key analytic tool for our work.