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Group actions: Remi Coulon (Rennes) - Growth gap in hyperbolic groups and amenability | Einstein Institute of Mathematics

Group actions: Remi Coulon (Rennes) - Growth gap in hyperbolic groups and amenability

Date: 
Thu, 02/11/201710:30-11:30
Location: 
hyperbolic groups and amenability
(joint work with Françoise Dal'Bo and Andrea Sambusetti)
Given a finitely generated group G acting properly on a metric space X,
the exponential growth rate of G with respect to X measures "how big"
the orbits of G are. If H is a subgroup of G, its exponential growth
rate is bounded above by the one of G. In this work we are interested in
the following question: what can we say if H and G have the same
exponential growth rate? This problem has both a combinatorial and a
geometric origin. For the combinatorial part, Grigorchuck and Cohen
proved in the 80's that a group Q = F/N (written as a quotient of the
free group) is amenable if and only if N and F have the same exponential
growth rate (with respect to the word length). About the same time,
Brooks gave a geometric interpretation of Kesten's amenability criterion
in terms of the bottom of the spectrum of the Laplace operator. He
obtained in this way a statement analogue to the one of Grigorchuck and
Cohen for the deck automorphism group of the cover of certain compact
hyperbolic manifolds. These works initiated many fruitful developments
in geometry, dynamics and group theory. We focus here one the class of
Gromov hyperbolic groups and propose a framework that encompasses both
the combinatorial and the geometric point of view. More precisely we
prove that if G is a hyperbolic group acting properly co-compactly on a
metric space X which is either a Cayley graph of G or a CAT(-1) space,
then the growth rate of H and G coincide if and only if H is co-amenable
in G. In addition if G has Kazhdan property (T) we prove that there is a
gap between the growth rate of G and the one of its infinite index
subgroups.