We investigate a question of Cooper adjacent to the Virtual Haken Conjecture.
Assuming certain conjectures in number theory, we show that there exist hyperbolic
rational homology 3–spheres with arbitrarily large injectivity radius. These examples
come from a tower of abelian covers of an explicit arithmetic 3–manifold. The
conjectures we must assume are the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis and a mild
strengthening of results of Taylor et al on part of the Langlands Program for
of an
imaginary quadratic field.
The proof of this theorem involves ruling out the existence of an irreducible two dimensional
Galois representation
of
satisfying certain prescribed ramification conditions. In contrast to similar questions of
this form,
is allowed to have arbitrary ramification at some prime
of
.
In the next paper in this volume, Boston and Ellenberg apply
pro–
techniques to our examples and show that our result is true unconditionally. Here, we
give additional examples where their techniques apply, including some non-arithmetic
examples.
Finally, we investigate the congruence covers of twist-knot orbifolds. Our
experimental evidence suggests that these topologically similar orbifolds have
rather different behavior depending on whether or not they are arithmetic. In
particular, the congruence covers of the non-arithmetic orbifolds have a paucity of
homology.