English

Coarse fundamental groups and box spaces

Group Theory 2020-04-29 v2 Algebraic Topology Metric Geometry

Abstract

We use a coarse version of the fundamental group first introduced by Barcelo, Kramer, Laubenbacher and Weaver to show that box spaces of finitely presented groups detect the normal subgroups used to construct the box space, up to isomorphism. As a consequence we have that two finitely presented groups admit coarsely equivalent box spaces if and only if they are commensurable via normal subgroups. We also provide an example of two filtrations (Ni)(N_i) and (Mi)(M_i) of a free group FF such that Mi>NiM_i>N_i for all ii with [Mi:Ni][M_i:N_i] uniformly bounded, but with (Ni)F\Box_{(N_i)}F not coarsely equivalent to (Mi)F\Box_{(M_i)}F. Finally, we give some applications of the main theorem for rank gradient and the first 2\ell^2 Betti number, and show that the main theorem can be used to construct infinitely many coarse equivalence classes of box spaces with various properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.02919,
  title  = {Coarse fundamental groups and box spaces},
  author = {Thiebout Delabie and Ana Khukhro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.02919},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

corrected references, additional corollaries of main result, and minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:47:07.919Z