Activities This Week

See attached file. This will be the first in a series of survey talks:

1. Operator ergodic theorems.

2. Ergodic and mixing theorems for Markov operators (discrete time Markov processes).

3. Ergodic theorems for random walks on locally compact groups (convolution powers). The second talk will focus on the results needed for the third one.

Let E be a quadratic imaginary field and p a prime which is inert in E. Let S be the special fiber (at p) of a unitary Shimura variety of signature (n,m) and hyperspecial level subgroup at p, associated with E/Q.

We study a natural foliation in the tangent bundle of S, which is originally defined on the \mu-ordinary stratum only, but is extended to a certain non-singular blow-up of S. We identify the quotient of S by the foliation with a certain irreducible component of a Shimura variety with parahoric level structure at p. As a result we get new results on the singularities of the latter.

We study integral submanifolds of the foliation and end the talk with a new conjecture of Andre-Oort type.

Hiroki Matui defined the concept of the topological group of an étale groupoid. In the case where the groupoid comes from a one-sided shift of finite type, he proved that the associated topological full group is finitely generated. We will show how to re-interpret these groups as tree almost automorphism groups and thus obtain compactly generated groups almost acting on trees.