Isoperimetry of group actions

Abstract

The isoperimetric profile of a discrete group was introduced by Vershik, however it is well defined only for a restrictive class amenable groups. We generalize the notion of isoperimetric profile beyond the world of amenable groups by defining isoperimetric profiles of amenable actions of finitely generated groups on compact topological spaces. This allows to extend the definition of the isoperimetric profile to all groups which are exact in such a way that for amenable groups it is equal to Vershik's isoperimetric profile. The main feature of our construction is that it preserves many of the properties known from the classical case. We use these results to compute exact asymptotics of the isoperimetric profiles for several classes of non-amenable groups.