2007-02-16

T. N. Venkataramana, Tata Institute

Jordan Decomposition in lattices and quasi-unipotence of monodromy

We prove that the semi-simple and unipotent parts of an element of a lattice in a semi-simple Lie group virtually belong to the lattice; this can be used to prove that under a holomorphic map from the punctured unit disc into a locally Hermitian symmetric space with finite volume, the image of the loop around the puncture is a quasi-unipotent element. This may be viewed as an extension of the big Picard Theorem to the case of locally Hermitian symmetric varieties.