On the growth of torsion in the cohomology of arithmetic groups

Let G be a semisimple Lie group with associated symmetric space D, and let Gamma subset G be a cocompact arithmetic group. Let L be a lattice inside a Z Gamma-module arising from a rational finite-dimensional complex representation of G. Bergeron and Venkatesh recently gave a precise conjecture about the growth of the order of the torsion subgroup H_i (Gamma_k; L )_tors as Gamma_k ranges over a tower of congruence subgroups of Gamma. In particular they conjectured that the ratio (log |H_i (Gamma_k ; L)_tors|)/[Gamma : Gamma_k] should tend to a nonzero limit if and only if i= (dim(D)-1)/2 and G is a group of deficiency 1. Furthermore, they gave a precise expression for the limit. In this paper, we investigate computationally the cohomology of several (non-cocompact) arithmetic groups, including GL_n (Z) for n=3,4,5 and GL_2 (O) for various rings of integers, and observe its growth as a function of level. In all cases where our dataset is sufficiently large, we observe excellent agreement with the same limit as in the predictions of Bergeron--Venkatesh. Our data also prompts us to make two new conjectures on the growth of torsion not covered by the Bergeron--Venkatesh conjecture.