Regular dessins with a given automorphism group

Dessins d'enfants are combinatorial structures on compact Riemann surfaces defined over algebraic number fields, and regular dessins are the most symmetric of them. If G is a finite group, there are only finitely many regular dessins with automorphism group G. It is shown how to enumerate them, how to represent them all as quotients of a single regular dessin U(G), and how certain hypermap operations act on them. For example, if G is a cyclic group of order n then U(G) is a map on the Fermat curve of degree n and genus (n-1)(n-2)/2. On the other hand, if G=A_5 then U(G) has genus 274218830047232000000000000000001. For other non-abelian finite simple groups, the genus is much larger.Comment: 19 page

Polygonal Complexes and Graphs for Crystallographic Groups

The paper surveys highlights of the ongoing program to classify discrete polyhedral structures in Euclidean 3-space by distinguished transitivity properties of their symmetry groups, focussing in particular on various aspects of the classification of regular polygonal complexes, chiral polyhedra, and more generally, two-orbit polyhedra.Comment: 21 pages; In: Symmetry and Rigidity, (eds. R.Connelly, A.Ivic Weiss and W.Whiteley), Fields Institute Communications, to appea

On groups with Property (T_lp)

Let p be a real number with 1<p and different from 2. We study Property (T_lp) for a second countable locally compact group G. Property (T_lp) is a weak version of Kazhdan's Property (T), defined in terms of the orthogonal representations of G on the sequence space lp. We show that Property (T_lp) for a totally disconnected group G is characterized by an isolation property of the trivial representation from the quasi-regular representations associated to open subgroups of G. Groups with Property (T_lp) share some important properties with Kazhdan groups (compact generation, compact abelianization, ...). Simple algebraic groups over non-archimedean local fields as well as automorphism groups of regular trees have Property (T_lp). In the case of discrete groups, Property (T_lp) implies Lubotzky's Property tau and is implied by Property (F) of Glasner and Monod. We show that an irreducible lattice in a product of two locally compact groups G and H have Property (T_lp), whenever G has Property (T) and H is connected and minimally almost periodic.Comment: 17 page

A unified proof of the Howe-Moore property

We provide a unified proof of all known examples of locally compact groups that enjoy the Howe-Moore property, namely, the vanishing at infinity of all matrix coefficients of the group unitary representations that are without non-zero invariant vectors. These examples are: connected, non-compact, simple real Lie groups with finite center, isotropic simple algebraic groups over non Archimedean local fields and closed, topologically simple subgroups of Aut(T) that act 2-transitively on the boundary at infinity of T, where T is a bi-regular tree with valence > 2 at every vertex.Comment: Final version, to appear in Journal of Lie Theor