Unitriangular factorizations of chevalley groups

Lately, the following problem attracted a lot of attention in various contexts: find the shortest factorization G = UU - UU - …U ± of a Chevalley group G = G(Φ, R) in terms of the unipotent radical U = U(Φ, R) of the standard Borel subgroup B = B(Φ, R) and the unipotent radical U - = U -(Φ, R) of the opposite Borel subgroup B - = B - (Φ, R). So far, the record over a finite field was established in a 2010 paper by Babai, Nikolov, and Pyber, where they prove that a group of Lie type admits the unitriangular factorization G = UU - UU - U of length 5. Their proof invokes deep analytic and combinatorial tools. In the present paper, we notice that from the work of Bass and Tavgen one immediately gets a much more general results, asserting that over any ring of stable rank 1 one has the unitriangular factorization G = UU - UU - of length 4. Moreover, we give a detailed survey of traingular factorizations, prove some related results, discuss prospects of generalization to other classes of rings, and state several unsolved problems. Another main result of the present paper asserts that, in the assumption of the Generalized Riemann’s Hypothesis, Chevalley groups over the ring $$ \mathbb{Z}\left[ {\frac{1}{p}} \right] $$ admit the unitriangular factorization G = UU - UU - UU - of length 6. Otherwise, the best length estimate for Hasse domains with infinte multiplicative groups that follows from the work of Cooke and Weinberger, gives 9 factors. Bibliography: 67 titles.