Filling invariants of stratified nilpotent Lie groups (Q2272943)

As is well-known, filling invariants of metric spaces measure the difficulty of finding admissible fillings of given boundaries. The author deals in this paper with filling invariants of stratified nilpotent Lie groups, which are of interest in geometric group theory because their asymptotic growth rates describe the large scale geometry of a metric space. Moreover, nilpotent Lie groups constitute a rich class of spaces having the whole spectrum of curvature. The author is particularly interested in two of these invariants: the filling functions, which measure the difficulty to fill Lipschitz cycles by Lipschitz chains and the higher divergence functions, which measure the difficulty to fill an outside an \(r\)-ball lying Lipschitz cycle with an outside a \(\rho \,r\)-ball (with \(0 < \rho \leq 1\)) lying Lipschitz chain. In the paper, the author proves, for a class of stratified nilpotent Lie groups that in the low dimensions the first mentioned invariants grow as fast as the ones of the Euclidean space and in the high dimensions slower than the filling functions of the Euclidean space. To do so, the author develops a purely algebraic condition on the Lie algebra of a stratified nilpotent Lie group. He also finds a sufficient criterion for such groups to have a filling function in a special dimension with faster growth as the appropriate filling function of the Euclidean space. Finally, with respect to the second invariant, he bounds the higher divergence functions of stratified nilpotent Lie groups.