Graph Theoretic Construction of Discrete Groups over p-adic Fields

Abstract

This paper is originally designed as a part of revision of the author's preprint math.AG/9908174 "P-adic Schwarzian triangle groups of Mumford type". Recently, Yves Andr'e pointed out a flaw in that preprint; more precisely, Proposition II there was not correct, and consequently, as he pointed out, some triangle groups are missing (but only in p=2,3,5). I apologize to the readers, and will release the other part soon by the original title. In this paper, we concentrate on the constructive part, but more systematically and in more general situation. More precisely, this paper presents a complete criterion for an abstract tree of groups to be realized in the context of p-adic uniformization. This criterion provides a practical way of constructing finitely generated discrete subgroups in PGL(2,K) over a p-adic field K. In the end of this paper, we will exhibit concrete examples of such construction, which in particular shows that there exist infinitely many triangle groups.