Coboundary and Cosystolic Expansion from Strong Symmetry

Abstract

Coboundary and cosystolic expansion are notions of expansion that generalize the Cheeger constant or edge expansion of a graph to higher dimensions. The classical Cheeger inequality implies that for graphs edge expansion is equivalent to spectral expansion. In higher dimensions this is not the case: a simplicial complex can be spectrally expanding but not have high dimensional edge-expansion. The phenomenon of high dimensional edge expansion in higher dimensions is much more involved than spectral expansion, and is far from being understood. In particular, prior to this work, the only known bounded degree cosystolic expanders were derived from the theory of buildings that is far from being elementary.
In this work we study high dimensional complexes which are strongly symmetric. Namely, there is a group that acts transitively on top dimensional cells of the simplicial complex [e.g., for graphs it corresponds to a group that acts transitively on the edges]. Using the strong symmetry, we develop a new machinery to prove coboundary and cosystolic expansion.
It was an open question whether the recent elementary construction of bounded degree spectral high dimensional expanders based on coset complexes give rise to bounded degree cosystolic expanders. In this work we answer this question affirmatively. We show that these complexes give rise to bounded degree cosystolic expanders in dimension two, and that their links are (two-dimensional) coboundary expanders. We do so by exploiting the strong symmetry properties of the links of these complexes using a new machinery developed in this work.
Previous works have shown a way to bound the co-boundary expansion using strong symmetry in the special situation of "building like" complexes. Our new machinery shows how to get coboundary expansion for general strongly symmetric coset complexes, which are not necessarily "building like", via studying the (Dehn function of the) presentation of the symmetry group of these complexes.