Groups acting on semimetric spaces and quasi-isometries of monoids

Abstract

We study groups acting by length-preserving transformations on spaces equipped with asymmetric, partially-defined distance functions. We introduce a natural notion of quasi-isometry for such spaces and exhibit an extension of the Svarc-Milnor Lemma to this setting. Among the most natural examples of these spaces are finitely generated monoids and semigroups and their Cayley and Schutzenberger graphs; we apply our results to show a number of important properties of monoids are quasi-isometry invariants.