Almost unimodular groups

We show that a locally compact group has open unimodular part if and only if the Plancherel weight on its group von Neumann algebra is almost periodic. We call such groups almost unimodular. The almost periodicity of the Plancherel weight allows one to define a Murray-von Neumann dimension for certain Hilbert space modules over the group von Neumann algebra, and we show that for finite covolume subgroups this dimension scales according to the covolume. Using this we obtain a generalization of the Atiyah-Schmid formula in the setting of second countable almost unimodular groups with finite covolume subgroups. Additionally, for the class of almost unimodular groups we present many examples, establish a number of permanence properties, and show that the formal degrees of irreducible and factorial square integrable representations are well behaved.