As a consequence of the work of Aubin and Yau on solution of
Calabi Conjecture in the case of negative
Ricci curvature, see , any fake projective plane is the quotient of a complex unit ball in 2 dimensions by a
discrete subgroup, which is the
fundamental group of the fake projective plane. This fundamental group must therefore be a
torsion-free and
cocompact discrete subgroup of PU(2,1) of
Euler-Poincaré characteristic 3. and showed that this fundamental group must also be an
arithmetic group.
Mostow's strong rigidity results imply that the fundamental group determines the fake plane, in the strong sense that any compact surface with the same fundamental group must be isometric to it. Two fake projective planes are defined to be in the same
class if their fundamental groups are both contained in the same maximal arithmetic subgroup of automorphisms of the unit ball. , used the volume formula for arithmetic groups from to list 28 non-empty classes of fake projective planes and show that there can at most be five extra classes which are not expected to exist. (See the addendum of the paper where the classification was refined and some errors in the original paper was corrected.) verified that the five extra classes indeed did not exist and listed all possibilities within the twenty-eight classes. There are exactly 50 fake projective planes classified up to isometry and hence 100 distinct fake projective planes classified up to biholomorphism. The fundamental group of the fake projective plane is an arithmetic subgroup of PU(2,1). Write
k for the associated number field (a totally real field) and
G for the associated
k-form of PU(2,1). If
l is the quadratic extension of
k over which
G is an inner form, then
l is a totally imaginary field. There is a division algebra
D with center
l and degree over
l 3 or 1, with an involution of the second kind which restricts to the nontrivial automorphism of
l over
k, and a nontrivial
Hermitian form on a module over
D of dimension 1 or 3 such that
G is the
special unitary group of this Hermitian form. (As a consequence of and the work of Cartwright and Steger,
D has degree 3 over
l and the module has dimension 1 over
D.) There is one real place of
k such that the points of
G form a copy of PU(2,1), and over all other real places of
k they form the compact group PU(3). From the result of , the automorphism group of a fake projective plane is either cyclic of order 1, 3, or 7, or the non-cyclic group of order 9, or the non-abelian group of order 21. The quotients of the fake projective planes by these groups were studied by and also by . ==List of the 50 fake projective planes==