Stability of the Haagerup property under graph products (Q6093315)

Perhaps the simplest definition of the Haagerup property is the following: a group \(G\) has the Haagerup property when it admits a proper, isometric affine action on a Hilbert space. One important family of such groups, by a result of \textit{G. Niblo} and \textit{L. Reeves} [Geom. Topol. 1, 1--7 (1997; Zbl 0887.20016)], is the class of groups admitting a proper action on a CAT(0) cube complex. This latter class of groups is stable under the operation of \textit{graph product}, a combinatorial kind of combination of groups that interpolates between the free product at one extreme and the direct product at the other. To wit, the prototypical example of a graph product of groups is the class of \textit{right-angled Artin groups} \(A_\Gamma\), where \(\Gamma\) is a finite simplicial graph. Indeed, begin with a wedge of \(|V(\Gamma)|\) circles, and glue in an \(n\)-cube to form an \(n\)-torus whenever the corresponding \(n\) vertices of \(\Gamma\) form a clique (complete graph) in \(\Gamma\). This complex may be given a locally-CAT(0) metric by declaring these gluings to be locally isometric gluings of unit \(n\)-cubes; the link of the unique vertex of the complex is closely related to \(\Gamma\) itself. Anyway, the universal cover of this complex is clearly a CAT(0) metric space with the structure of a cubical complex. For a more general graph product, one can begin with ``vertex'' CAT(0) cube complexes and glue them together in the pattern of \(\Gamma\) to produce a new CAT(0) cube complex equipped with a proper action of the graph product provided the vertex groups of the graph product acted properly on the vertex complexes to begin with. The main result of this paper is in some sense a generalization of this fact to arbitrary groups with the Haagerup property. That is, this property is stable under graph products. Although for a general example we may not have a CAT(0) cube complex to work with for each vertex group, the proper actions on Hilbert spaces still ``glue together'' in the pattern of a CAT(0) cube complex to produce a new action on a Hibert space. This result was first obtained using apparently different methods by \textit{Y. Antolín} and \textit{D. Dreesen} [``The Haagerup property is stable under graph products'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1305.6748}]. Both papers are motivated by CAT(0) cube complexes, but the present proof goes via certain functions \(k : G \times G \to \mathbb{C}\) the authors term ``conditionally negative definite''. They show that the existence of a proper, symmetric conditionally negative definite function \(k : G \times G \to \mathbb{C}\) is equivalent to the Haagerup property and that this equivalent condition is stable under graph product.