Paper detail

Arithmetic quotients of the mapping class group

To every $Q$-irreducible representation $r$ of a finite group $H$, there corresponds a simple factor $A$ of $Q[H]$ with an involution $τ$. To this pair $(A,τ)$, we associate an arithmetic group $Ω$ consisting of all $(2g-2)\times (2g-2)$ matrices over a natural order of $A^{op}$ which preserve a natural skew-Hermitian sesquilinear form on $A^{2g-2}$. We show that if $H$ is generated by less than $g$ elements, then $Ω$ is a virtual quotient of the mapping class group $Mod(Σ_g)$, i.e. a finite index subgroup of $Ω$ is a quotient of a finite index subgroup of $\Mod(Σ_g)$. This shows that the mapping class group has a rich family of arithmetic quotients (and "Torelli subgroups") for which the classical quotient $Sp(2g, Z)$ is just a first case in a list, the case corresponding to the trivial group $H$ and the trivial representation. Other pairs of $H$ and $r$ give rise to many new arithmetic quotients of $Mod(Σ_g)$ which are defined over various (subfields of) cyclotomic fields and are of type $Sp(2m), SO(2m,2m),$ and $SU(m,m)$ for arbitrarily large $m$.