Sharp quantitative nonembeddability of the Heisenberg group into superreflexive Banach spaces (Q374092)

It was recently discovered that the Heisenberg group is a very important example in the theory of metric embeddings into Banach spaces. As one of the starting points, \textit{J. Cheeger} and \textit{B. Kleiner} [Nankai Tracts in Mathematics 11, 129--152 (2006; Zbl 1139.58004)] and \textit{J. R. Lee} and \textit{A. Naor} [``\(L^p\) metrics on the Heisenberg group and the Goemans-Linial conjecture'', in: Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS '06), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 99--108 (2006; \url{doi:10.1109/FOCS.2006.47})] observed that the argument of \textit{S. Semmes} [Rev. Mat. Iberoam. 12, No. 2, 337--410 (1996; Zbl 0858.46017)], based on Pansu's differentiation theorem [\textit{P. Pansu}, Ann. Math. (2) 129, No. 1, 1--60 (1989; Zbl 0678.53042)], can be used to prove that the (continuous) Heisenberg group does not admit a bilipschitz embedding into a Banach spaces with the Radon-Nikodým property. As a consequence, the discrete Heisenberg group does not admit bilipschitz embeddings into uniformly convex Banach spaces (and thus, into superreflexive Banach spaces, the isomorphic counterpart of uniformly convex Banach spaces). Since the results of this type are of interest for computer science, the corresponding quantitative estimates are very important. In some cases, the estimates were obtained by \textit{J. Cheeger}, \textit{B. Kleiner} and \textit{A. Naor} [Acta Math. 207, No. 2, 291--373 (2011; Zbl 1247.46020)]. The present paper is devoted to further results in this direction. The authors denote the discrete Heisenberg group by \(\mathbb{H}\), the word metric on it by \(d_W\). Let \((X,\|\cdot\|)\) be Banach space whose modulus of uniform convexity satisfies \(\delta_X(t)\geq ct^p\), for some \(c>0\) and \(2\leq p<\infty\) (by the result of \textit{G. Pisier} [Isr. J. Math. 20, 326--350 (1975; Zbl 0344.46030)] each superreflexive Banach space is isomorphic to such a space). The first main result is that, for any Lipschitz function \(f:\mathbb{H}\to X\) there exist \(0<C<\infty\) and \(x,y\in \mathbb{H}\) with \(d_W(x,y)\) arbitrarily large, such that \[ \frac{\|f(x)-f(y)\|}{d_W(x,y)}\leq C \left(\frac{\log\log d_W(x,y)}{\log d_W(x,y)}\right)^{1/p}. \] The authors also show that the distortion \(D\) of any bilipschitz embedding into \(X\) of a ball of radius \(R\geq 4\) in \(\mathbb{H}\) satisfies \(D\geq c\left(\frac{\log R}{\log\log R}\right)^{1/p}\) for some \(c>0\). Both results are sharp up to the iterated logarithm terms. An important tool is the reduction to the equivariant case proved by \textit{A. Naor} and \textit{Y. Peres} [Duke Math. J. 157, No. 1, 53--108 (2011; Zbl 1268.20044)]. In the case where \(X\) is a Hilbert space, the authors also give a second, representation theoretic proof yielding stronger bounds which are sharp up to a universal constant.