\(K\)-homological finiteness and hyperbolic groups (Q1628523)

Connes' work on a non-commutative analogue of a Chern character for $K$-homology [\textit{A. Connes}, Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 62, 41--144 (1985; Zbl 0592.46056)] revealed the importance of finitely summable Fredholm modules. In the present paper, the following uniform version of finite summability is proposed: a $C^*$-algebra $A$ is said to have uniformly summable $K$-homology if all its $K$-homology classes can be represented by Fredholm modules which are finitely summable over the same dense subalgebra and with the same degree of summability. This definition is motivated by a classical fact which implies that the $C^*$-algebra $C(M)$ of continuous functions on a smooth closed manifold $M$ has uniformly $p$-summable $K$-homology over the smooth subalgebra $C^\infty(M)$ for every $p>\dim M$. \par The authors then proceed to investigate uniform summability of the $C^*$-algebras $C(\partial\Gamma)\rtimes \Gamma$ and $C_r^*\Gamma$ for hyperbolic groups $\Gamma$ which are regular and not virtually cyclic, where regularity means that the boundary $\partial\Gamma$ admits a continuous self-map without fixed points. The main results include: if $\Gamma$ is a regular and torsion-free hyperbolic group, then the crossed product $C^*$-algebra $C(\partial\Gamma)\rtimes\Gamma$ has uniformly summable $K$-homology; and if $\Gamma$ is a finitely generated free group, a torsion-free cocompact lattice in $\mathrm{SO}(n,1)$ or $\mathrm{SU}(n,1)$, or a torsion-free $C'(1/6)$ small-cancellation group with one more generator than relators, then the reduced group $C^*$-algebra $C_r^*\Gamma$ has uniformly summable $K$-homology over the group algebra $\mathbb{C}\Gamma$. More detailed and more general versions of these results, which do not fit into this review, are also given and they contain explicit summability degrees, depending on a suitable notion of dimension of the boundary $\partial\Gamma$, as well as explicit finitely summable representatives for the $K$-homology classes.