Diameters of random Cayley graphs of finite nilpotent groups (Q1983958)

The authors prove the existence of a limiting distribution for the appropriately rescaled diameters of random undirected Cayley graphs of finite nilpotent groups of bounded rank and nilpotency class, thus extending a result of \textit{U. Shapira} and \textit{R. Zuck} [Combinatorica 39, No. 5, 1133--1148 (2019; Zbl 1449.05136)] which dealt with the case of abelian groups. The limiting distribution is defined on a space of unimodular lattices, as in the case of random Cayley graphs of abelian groups. Their result, when specialized to a certain family of unitriangular groups, establishes a very recent conjecture of \textit{J. Hermon} and \textit{S. Olesker-Taylor} [``Cutoff for random walks on upper triangular matrices'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1911.02974}]. They derive this result as a consequence of a general inequality. More precisely, let \(\{G_n\}_n\) be a sequence of finite nilpotent groups of rank at most \(r,\) nilpotency class at most \(c\) and with \(\lim_{n\to \infty}|G_n|=\infty.\) Choosing a subset \(S\) uniformly at random among all symmetric generating subsets of \(G_n\) of size \(k,\) then as \(n \to \infty\), the random variables \(\mathrm{diam}(\Gamma(G_n,S))/|G_n^{\mathrm{ab}}|^{1/k}\) converge in distribution.