PROPERTIES OF HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL SHINTANI GENERATING FUNCTIONS AND COCYCLES ON PGL₃([Qfr ])

Abstract

In an earlier paper the second author used the formal, algebraic properties of $2$-dimensional Shintani generating functions to construct a $1$-cocycle on ${\rm PGL}_2(\mathbb{Q})$. We aim to generalise these results by using such functions in dimension $n$ to obtain an $(n-1)$-cocycle on ${\rm PGL}_n(\mathbb{Q})$, presumably related to the Bernoulli and Eisenstein cocycles of R.~Sczech. By improving our methods we achieve this goal for $n=3$. For $n>3$ we encounter obstacles related to degenerate configurations of hyperplanes in $n$-space. Nevertheless, we obtain partial results closely connected to reciprocity laws for certain $n$-dimensional Dedekind sums. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 11F20, 11F75.