Quantitative aspects of acyclicity

Abstract

The Cheeger constant is a measure of the edge expansion of a graph and as such plays a key role in combinatorics and theoretical computer science. In recent years, there is an interest in k-dimensional versions of the Cheeger constant that likewise provide quantitative measure of cohomological acyclicity of a complex in dimension k. In this paper, we study several aspects of the higher Cheeger constants. Our results include methods for bounding the cosystolic norm of k-cochains and the k-th Cheeger constants, with applications to the expansion of pseudomanifolds, Coxeter complexes and homogenous geometric lattices. We revisit a theorem of Gromov on the expansion of a product of a complex with a simplex and provide an elementary derivation of the expansion in a hypercube. We prove a lower bound on the maximal cosystole in a complex and an upper bound on the expansion of bounded degree complexes and give an essentially sharp estimate for the cosystolic norm of the Paley cochains. Finally, we discuss a non-abelian version of the one-dimensional expansion of a simplex, with an application to a question of Babson on bounded quotients of the fundamental group of a random 2-complex.