Translation-like actions of nilpotent groups

Abstract

We give a new obstruction to translation-like actions on nilpotent groups. Suppose we are given two finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups with the same degree of polynomial growth, but non-isomorphic Carnot completions (asymptotic cones). We show that there exists no injective Lipschitz function from one group to the other. It follows that neither group can act translation-like on the other. As Lipschitz injections need not be bi-Lipschitz embeddings, this is a strengthening of a classical result of Pansu in the context of groups of the same homogeneous dimension.