On the Hausdorff spectra of free pro-$p$ groups and certain $p$-adic analytic groups

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Hausdorff spectra of free pro-$p$ groups and $p$-adic analytic groups, establishing conditions for full spectra, bounds on spectrum size, and constructing examples with prescribed spectra.

Contribution

It proves that certain free pro-$p$ groups have full Hausdorff spectra, improves bounds on spectrum size for $p$-adic analytic groups, and constructs groups with customizable finite spectra.

Findings

Finitely generated non-abelian free pro-$p$ groups have full Hausdorff spectrum.

The spectrum size of finitely generated nilpotent pro-$p$ groups is bounded by their analytic dimension.

Existence of groups with arbitrary finite Hausdorff spectra under specific filtration series.

Abstract

We establish that finitely generated non-abelian direct products $G$ of free pro-$p$ groups have full Hausdorff spectrum with respect to the lower $p$-series $\mathcal{L}$. This complements similar results with respect to other standard filtration series and a recent theorem showing that the Hausdorff spectrum $\text{hspec}^\mathcal{L}(G)$ of a $p$-adic analytic pro-$p$ group $G$ is discrete and consists of at most $2^{\dim(G)}$ rational numbers. The latter also left some room for improvement regarding the upper bound. Indeed, for finitely generated nilpotent pro-$p$ groups $G$ we obtain the stronger assertion that the cardinality of the Hausdorff spectrum is at most the analytic dimension of $G$. Moreover, we produce a corresponding result when the $p$-adic analytic pro-$p$ group $G$ is just infinite, which holds not just for the lower $p$-series but for arbitrary filtration series. Finally, we show that, if $G$ is a countably based pro-$p$ group with an open subgroup mapping onto the free abelian pro-$p$ group $\mathbb{Z}_p \oplus \mathbb{Z}_p$, then for every prescribed finite set $\{0,1\} \subseteq X \subseteq [0,1]$ there is a filtration series $\mathcal{S}$ such that $\text{hspec}^\mathcal{S}(G) = X$; in particular, $|\text{hspec}^{\mathcal{S}}(G)|$ is unbounded, as $\mathcal{S}$ runs through all filtration series of $G$ with $|\text{hspec}^{\mathcal{S}}(G)| < \infty$.