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By work of Belyi, the absolute Galois group G_Q of the rational numbers embeds into a subgroup \hat{GT} called the Grothendeick-Teichmuller group of the group A of continuous automorphisms of a profinite group on two generators. We show that a rich class of representations of G_Q lifts to \hat{GT} by showing they lift all the way to a finite index subgroup of A. 

Ramanujan graphs are graphs whose spectrum is bounded optimally. Such graphs have found numerous applications in combinatorics and computer science. In recent years, a high-dimensional theory has emerged. In this paper, these developments are surveyed. After explaining their connection to the Ramanujan conjecture, we will present some old and new results with an emphasis on random walks on these discrete objects and on the Euclidean spheres. The latter lead to ‘golden gates’ which are of importance in quantum computation. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Srinivasa Ramanujan: in celebration of the centenary of his election as FRS’. 

Several well-known open questions (such as: are all groups sofic/hyperlinear?) have a common form: can all groups be approximated by asymptotic homomorphisms into the symmetric groups $\text{Sym}(n)$ (in the sofic case) or the finite-dimensional unitary groups $\text{U}(n)$ (in the hyperlinear case)? In the case of $\text{U}(n)$ , the question can be asked with respect to different metrics and norms. This paper answers, for the first time, one of these versions, showing that there exist finitely presented groups which are not approximated by $\text{U}(n)$ with respect to the Frobenius norm $\Vert T\Vert _{\text{Frob}}=\sqrt{\sum _{i,j=1}^{n}|T_{ij}|^{2}},T=[T_{ij}]_{i,j=1}^{n}\in \text{M}_{n}(\mathbb{C})$ . Our strategy is to show that some higher dimensional cohomology vanishing phenomena implies stability , that is, every Frobenius-approximate homomorphism into finite-dimensional unitary groups is close to an actual homomorphism. This is combined with existence results of certain nonresidually finite central extensions of lattices in some simple $p$ -adic Lie groups. These groups act on high-rank Bruhat–Tits buildings and satisfy the needed vanishing cohomology phenomenon and are thus stable and not Frobenius-approximated.