Asymptotics of Cheeger constants and unitarisability of groups (Q2304463)

A linear representation of a group in a Hilbert space is said to be unitarisable if it is conjugate to a unitary representation by a bounded operator. It is known that unitarisability is more general than amenability, but the converse is an open question, formulated by Dixmier. In the paper under review, the authors establish a connection between the unitarisability of the uniformly bounded linear representations of a group and the asymptotic behaviour of the isoperimetric constants of its Cayley graphs for increasingly large generating sets. This connection is based on an analytic invariant they introduce, which can take values in \([0,\infty]\) and which they call the Littlewood exponent of the group. They also obtain several other results. The following is a very partial list: there exist finitely generated torsion groups with Littlewood exponent equal to \(\infty\); for a given group, having Littlewood exponent \(0, 1,2, \infty\) gives information about finiteness, amenability, unitarisability and the existence of free subgroups of that group; there exist groups whose Littlewood exponent is finite and greater than one. The authors also gives several applications of the theory they develop and they discuss examples and open problems. This work, and the name Littlewood exponent, are motivated by works by \textit{M. Bożejko} and \textit{G. Fendler} [Arch. Math. 57, No. 3, 290--298 (1991; Zbl 0726.43007)] and \textit{J. Wysoczański} [Colloq. Math. 55, No. 2, 261--265 (1988; Zbl 0681.43005)] who made relations between unitarisability, amenability and the space of Littlewood functions on that group.