We study countable saturation of metric reduced products and introduce continuous fields of metric structures indexed by locally compact, separable, completely metrizable spaces. Saturation of the reduced product depends both on the underlying index space and the model. By using the Gelfand–Naimark duality we conclude that the assertion that the Stone–Čech remainder of the half-line has only trivial automorphisms is independent from ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization of set theory with the Axiom of Choice). Consistency of this statement follows from the Proper Forcing Axiom, and this is the first known example of a connected space with this property.

Given a separably closed field $K$ of characteristic $p>0$ and finite degree of imperfection, we study the $\sharp$ functor which takes a semiabelian variety $G$ over $K$ to the maximal divisible subgroup of $G(K)$. Our main result is an example where $G^{\sharp }$, as a ‘type-definable group’ in $K$, does not have ‘relative Morley rank’, yielding a counterexample to a claim in Hrushovski [J. Amer. Math. Soc. 9 (1996), 667–690]. Our methods involve studying the question of the preservation of exact sequences by the $\sharp$ functor, and relating this to issues of descent as well as model-theoretic properties of $G^{\sharp }$. We mention some characteristic 0 analogues of these ‘exactness-descent’ results, where differential algebraic methods are more prominent. We also develop the notion of an iterative D-structure on a group scheme over an iterative Hasse field, which is interesting in its own right, as well as providing a uniform treatment of the characteristic 0 and characteristic $p$ cases of ‘exactness descent’.

We continue the research programme of comparing the complex exponential with Zilberś exponential. For the latter, we prove, using diophantine geometry, various properties about zero sets of exponential functions, proved for $\mathbb{C}$ using analytic function theory, for example, the Identity Theorem.

It is well known that a finitely generated group ${\rm\Gamma}$ has Kazhdan’s property (T) if and only if the Laplacian element ${\rm\Delta}$ in $\mathbb{R}[{\rm\Gamma}]$ has a spectral gap. In this paper, we prove that this phenomenon is witnessed in $\mathbb{R}[{\rm\Gamma}]$. Namely, ${\rm\Gamma}$ has property (T) if and only if there exist a constant ${\it\kappa}>0$ and a finite sequence ${\it\xi}_{1},\ldots ,{\it\xi}_{n}$ in $\mathbb{R}[{\rm\Gamma}]$ such that ${\rm\Delta}^{2}-{\it\kappa}{\rm\Delta}=\sum _{i}{\it\xi}_{i}^{\ast }{\it\xi}_{i}$. This result suggests the possibility of finding new examples of property (T) groups by solving equations in $\mathbb{R}[{\rm\Gamma}]$, possibly with the assistance of computers.

Cet article est une contribution à la fois au calcul du nombre de fibrés de Hitchin sur une courbe projective et à l’explicitation de la partie nilpotente de la formule des traces d’Arthur-Selberg pour une fonction test très simple. Le lien entre les deux questions a été établi dans [Chaudouard, Sur le comptage des fibrés de Hitchin. À paraître aux actes de la conférence en l’honneur de Gérard Laumon]. On décompose cette partie nilpotente en une somme d’intégrales adéliques indexées par les orbites nilpotentes. Pour les orbites de type «régulières par blocs», on explicite complètement ces intégrales en termes de la fonction zêta de la courbe.

In this paper, we provide a concrete interpretation of equivariant Reidemeister torsion, and demonstrate that Bismut–Zhang’s equivariant Cheeger–Müller theorem simplifies considerably when applied to locally symmetric spaces. In a companion paper, this allows us to extend recent results on torsion cohomology growth and torsion cohomology comparison for arithmetic locally symmetric spaces to an equivariant setting.

We consider systems of quasi-periodic linear differential equations associated to a ‘resonant’ frequency vector ${\it\omega}$, namely, a vector whose coordinates are not linearly independent over $\mathbb{Z}$. We give sufficient conditions that ensure that a small analytic perturbation of a constant system is analytically conjugate to a ‘resonant cocycle’. We also apply our results to the non-resonant case: we obtain sufficient conditions for reducibility.