Cohomology of Compact Locally Symmetric Spaces

We obtain a necessary condition for a cohomology class on a compact locally symmetric space S()=X (a quotient of a symmetric space X of the non-compact type by a cocompact arithmetic subgroup of isometries of X) to restrict non-trivially to a compact locally symmetric subspace S _H()=Y of X. The restriction is in a 'virtual' sense, i.e. it is the restriction of possibly a translate of the cohomology class under a Hecke correspondence. As a consequence we deduce that when X and Y are the unit balls in ⁿ and ^m , then low degree cohomology classes on the variety S() restrict non-trivially to the subvariety S _H (); this proves a conjecture of M. Harris and J-S. Li. We also deduce the non-vanishing of cup-products of cohomology classes for the variety S().     

Monodromy of cyclic coverings of the projective line

We show that the image of the pure braid group under the monodromy action on the homology of a cyclic covering of degree d of the projective line is an arithmetic group provided the number of ramification points is sufficiently large compared to the degree d and the ramification degrees are co-prime to d.