Related papers: Growth tightness and genericity for word metrics f…
We establish growth tightness for a class of groups acting geometrically on a geodesic metric space and containing a contracting element. As a consequence, any group with nontrivial Floyd boundary are proven to be growth tight with respect…
A group action on a metric space is called growth tight if the exponential growth rate of the group with respect to the induced pseudo-metric is strictly greater than that of its quotients. A prototypical example is the action of a free…
We show that a quasi-geodesic in an injective metric space is Morse if and only if it is strongly contracting. Since mapping class groups and, more generally, hierarchically hyperbolic groups act properly and coboundedly on injective metric…
In the Cayley graph of the mapping class group of a closed surface, with respect to any generating set, we look at a ball of large radius centered on the identity vertex, and at the proportion among the vertices in this ball representing…
Given a finite generating set $S$, let us endow the mapping class group of a closed hyperbolic surface with the word metric for $S$. We discuss the following question: does the proportion of non-pseudo-Anosov mapping classes in the ball of…
We introduce and systematically study the concept of a growth tight action. This generalizes growth tightness for word metrics as initiated by Grigorchuk and de la Harpe. Given a finitely generated, non-elementary group $G$ acting on a…
Let $G$ be a group acting properly by isometries and with a strongly contracting element on a geodesic metric space. Let $N$ be an infinite normal subgroup of $G$, and let $\delta_N$ and $\delta_G$ be the growth rates of $N$ and $G$ with…
This book offers to study locally compact groups from the point of view of appropriate metrics that can be defined on them, in other words to study "Infinite groups as geometric objects", as Gromov writes it in the title of a famous…
Let G be a finitely generated group and Cay(G, S) be the Cayley graph of G with respect to a finite generating set S. We characterize the Gromov hyperbolicity of G in terms of the genericity of contracting elements in Cay(G, S).
We show that every non-trivial compact connected group and every non-trivial general or special linear group over an infinite field admits a generating set such that the associated Cayley graph has infinite diameter.
We investigate the geometry of word metrics on fundamental groups of manifolds associated with the generating sets consisting of elements represented by closed geodesics. We ask whether the diameter of such a metric is finite or infinite.…
We study word metrics on Z^d by developing tools that are fine enough to measure dependence on the generating set. We obtain counting and distribution results for the words of length n. With this, we show that counting measure on spheres…
We prove a quantitative refinement of the statement that groups of polynomial growth are finitely presented. Let $G$ be a group with finite generating set $S$ and let $\operatorname{Gr}(r)$ be the volume of the ball of radius $r$ in the…
We show that every non-elementary group $G$ acting properly and cocompactly by isometries on a proper geodesic Gromov hyperbolic space $X$ is growth tight. In other words, the exponential growth rate of $G$ for the geometric…
We study how the spectral gap and diameter of Cayley graphs depend strongly on the choice of generating set. We answer a question of Pyber and Szab\'o (2013) by exhibiting a sequence of finite groups $G_n$ with $|G_n| \to \infty$ admitting…
We show that doubling at some large scale in a Cayley graph implies uniform doubling at all subsequent scales. The proof is based on the structure theorem for approximate subgroups proved by Green, Tao and the first author. We also give a…
We bound the volume of thick embeddings of finite graphs into the Heisenberg group, as well as the volume of coarse wirings of finite graphs into groups with polynomial growth. This work follows the work of Kolmogorov-Brazdin, Gromov-Guth…
This note constructs a finitely generated group $W$ whose word-growth is exponential, but for which the infimum of the growth rates over all finite generating sets is 1 -- in other words, of non-uniformly exponential growth. This answers a…
Given a finitely generated group with generating set $S$, we study the cogrowth sequence, which is the number of words of length $n$ over the alphabet $S$ that are equal to one. This is related to the probability of return for walks the…
We show that for some absolute (explicit) constant $C$, the following holds for every finitely generated group $G$, and all $d >0$: If there is some $ R_0 > \exp(\exp(Cd^C))$ for which the number of elements in a ball of radius $R_0$ in a…