Scaling limits of Cayley graphs with polynomially growing balls

Abstract

Benjamini, Finucane and the first author have shown that if (G_n,S_n) is a sequence of Cayley graphs such that |S_n^n|=O(n^D|S_n|), then the sequence (G_n,d_{S_n}/n) is relatively compact for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology and every cluster point is a connected nilpotent Lie group equipped with a left-invariant sub-Finsler metric. In this paper we show that the dimension of such a cluster point is bounded by D, and that, under the stronger bound |S_n^n|=O(n^D), the homogeneous dimension of a cluster point is bounded by D. Our approach is roughly to use a well-known structure theorem for approximate groups due to Breuillard, Green and Tao to replace S_n^n with a coset nilprogression of bounded rank, and then to use results about nilprogressions from a previous paper of ours to study the ultralimits of such coset nilprogressions. As an application we bound the dimension of the scaling limit of a sequence of vertex-transitive graphs of large diameter. We also recover and effectivise parts of an argument of Tao concerning the further growth of single set S satisfying the bound |S^n| < Mn^D|S|.

37 pages. This version contains updated references to the companion paper arXiv:1612.05152 to reflect some organisational changes we made to that paper