A Note on Riemann Surfaces of Large Systole

We examine the large systole problem, which concerns compact hyperbolic Riemannian surfaces whose systole, the length of the shortest noncontractible loops, grows logarithmically in genus. The generalization of a construction of Buser and Sarnak by Katz, Schaps, and Vishne, which uses principal "congruence" subgroups of a fixed cocompact arithmetic Fuchsian, achieves the current maximum known growth constant of \gamma = 4/3. We prove that this is the best possible value of \gamma for this construction using arithmetic Fuchsians in the congruence case. The final section compares the large systole problem with the analogous large girth problem for regular graphs.