Fixed point property for a CAT(0) space which admits a proper cocompact group action (Q291004)

Let \(G=(V,E)\) be a graph endowed with weighted edges. The (linear) spectral gap \(\mu_{1}(G)\) is the first positive eigenvalue of the associated Laplacian \(\Delta\) acting on the space of functions \(\{ f: V\to \mathbb{R}\}\). If we replace \(\mathbb{R}\) by a CAT(0) metric space \(X\), we no longer have the Laplacian, but one can still define analogues of its first eigenvalue -- the nonlinear spectral gaps, such as the Wang invariant \(\lambda_{1}(G,X)\). The main results of the paper state that for certain classes \(\mathcal{X}\) of CAT(0) spaces, estimates of the form \(\lambda_{1}(G,X) \geq C_{\mathcal{X}} \mu_{1}(G)\) hold uniformly for all graphs \(G\) and spaces \(X\in\mathcal{X}\). More precisely, \(\mathcal{X}\) can be either the class of all (finite or infinite) products of some finite family of CAT(0) spaces admitting a proper cocompact isometric group action, or the family of all products of uniformly locally doubling CAT(0) spaces with common doubling constant. Applications of these results include a fixed point theorem for random groups and coarse non-embeddability of expanders into spaces belonging to the families described above.