Strong property (T) for higher rank lattices

Abstract

We prove that every lattice in a product of higher rank simple Lie groups or higher rank simple algebraic groups over local fields has Vincent Lafforgue's strong property (T). Over non-archimedean local fields, we also prove that they have strong Banach proerty (T) with respect to all Banach spaces with nontrivial type, whereas in general we obtain such a result with additional hypotheses on the Banach spaces. The novelty is that we deal with non-cocompact lattices, such as $\mathrm{SL}_n(\mathbf{Z})$ for $n \geq 3$. To do so, we introduce a stronger form of strong property (T) which allows us to deal with more general objects than group representations on Banach spaces that we call two-step representations, namely families indexed by a group of operators between different Banach spaces that we can compose only once. We prove that higher rank groups have this property and that this property passes to undistorted lattices.