Torsion in the homology of arithmetic groups, and an Iwasawa algebra puzzle

Kudos to Nicolas Bergeron, Paul Gunnells, and Akshay Venkatesh for organizing a wonderfully interesting conference at BIRS on torsion on the homology of arithmetic groups.  If you had the bad luck not to be in Banff last week, never fear:  they’ve put in an ultra-fancy new recording/streaming system and you can watch most of the talks online.  The introductory talks by Frank Calegari and Nicolas are a great place to start.

I was raised to think of torsion classes in homology as a terrifying mystery that one dealt with by tensoring with the rational numbers as quickly as possible.  But our knowledge about these things is actually starting to accumulate!

Here’s a puzzle that came up while I was talking to Simon Marshall, whose work makes crucial work of the story about completed cohomology of towers of manifolds that Frank Calegari and Matt Emerton have been steadily telling us.

(remark:  everything below is written off the cuff and no details are checked.)

Do all curves over finite fields have covers with a sqrt(q) eigenvalue?

On my recent visit to Illinois, my colleage Nathan Dunfield (now blogging!) explained to me the following interesting open question, whose answer is supposed to be “yes”:

Q1: Let f be a pseudo-Anosov mapping class on a Riemann surface Sigma of genus at least 2, and M_f the mapping cylinder obtained by gluing the two ends of Sigma x interval together by means of f.  Then M_f is a hyperbolic 3-manifold with first Betti number 1.  Is there a finite cover M of M_f with b_1(M) > 1?

You might think of this as (a special case of) a sort of “relative virtual positive Betti number conjecture.”  The usual vpBnC says that a 3-manifold has a finite cover with positive Betti number; this says that when your manifold starts life with Betti number 1, you can get “extra” first homology by passing to a cover.

Of course, when I see “3-manifold fibered over the circle” I whip out a time-worn analogy and think “algebraic curve over a finite field.”  So here’s the number theorist’s version of the above question:

Q2: Let X/F_q be an algebraic curve of genus at least 2 over a finite field.  Does X have a finite etale cover Y/F_{q^d} such that the action of Frobenius on H^1(Y,Z_ell) has an eigenvalue equal to q^{d/2}?