Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 10th of September 2008, 3:00-3:50

Groups and Dynamics Seminar


Controlled coarse homology and isoperimetric inequalities

Piotr Nowak of Texas A&M University


We will study a controlled coarse homology theory on finitely generated groups as a generalization of uniformly finite homology of J.Block and S.Weinberger, and vanishing of a particular "fundamental class" in the 0th homology group. We will show that on any group one needs at most linear control to kill the fundamental class and that this vanishing is characterized by a certain isoperimetric inequality on the group. Inequalities of this type were studied earlier by A.Zuk and E.Erschler.

We will also use invariants like type of asymptotic dimension, isoperimetric profile, isodiametric profile and decay of the heat kernel to estimate the growth necessary to kill the fundamental class. As applications we will show a link with growth of primitives of volume forms on open Riemannian manifolds (in particular show a short proof of Gromov's solution to Sullivan's problem) and make a connection to weighted Poincare inequalities studied in the context of rigidity by P.Li and J.Wang.

This is joint work with Jan Spakula (University of Muenster), a preprint is available at http://www.math.tamu.edu/~pnowak/index/research.html.