The fundamental group of a toroidal compactification of a Hermitian locally symmetric space

Abstract

The present work obtains the fundamental group of a toroidal compactification X' of a non-compact quotient X of a Hermitian symmetric space D of non-compact type by a lattice L in the isometry group G of D. As a consequence it derives the equality of the ranks of the first homology groups of X' and X with integral coefficients. The paper provides also a sufficient condition on a torsion free non-uniform lattice L, under which the fundamental group of X' is residually finite. Articles of Hummel-Schroeder, Hummel and Di Cerbo imply that the toroidal compactifications X' of generic non-compact torsion free quotients X of the complex balls satisfy this sufficient condition.