Metric characterizations of superreflexivity in terms of word hyperbolic groups and finite graphs

Abstract

We show that superreflexivity can be characterized in terms of bilipschitz embeddability of word hyperbolic groups. We compare characterizations of superreflexivity in terms of diamond graphs and binary trees. We show that there exist sequences of series-parallel graphs of increasing topological complexity which admit uniformly bilipschitz embeddings into a Hilbert space, and thus do not characterize superreflexivity.