Counting lattices in products of trees

Abstract

A BMW group of degree $(m,n)$ is a group that acts simply transitively on vertices of the product of two regular trees of degrees $m$ and $n$. We show that the number of commensurability classes of BMW groups of degree $(m,n)$ is bounded between $(mn{)}^{\alpha mn}$ and $(mn{)}^{\beta mn}$ for some $0<\alpha <\beta$. In fact, we show that the same bounds hold for virtually simple BMW groups. We introduce a random model for BMW groups of degree $(m,n)$ and show that asymptotically almost surely a random BMW group in this model is irreducible and hereditarily just-infinite.