Free quotients of infinite rank of GL2 over Dedekind domains

This paper is concerned with integral domains R, for which the factor group SL2(R)/U2(R) has a non-trivial, free quotient, where U2(R) is the subgroup of GL2(R) generated by the unipotent matrices. Recently, Krstić and McCool have proved that SL2(P[x])/U2(P[x]) has a free quotient of infinite rank, where P is a domain which is not a field. This extends earlier results of Grunewald, Mennicke and Vaserstein.Any ring of the type P[x] has Krull dimension at least 2. The purpose of this paper is to show that result of Krstić and McCool extends to some domains of Krull dimension 1, in particular to certain Dedekind domains. This result, which represents a two-dimensional anomaly is the best possible in the following sense. It is well known that SL2(R) = U2(R), when R is a domain of Krull dimension zero, i.e. when R is a field. It is already known that for some arithmetic Dedekind domains A, the factor group SL2(A)/U2(A) has a free quotient of finite (and not infinite) rank.