Isoperimetric Inequalities for Ramanujan Complexes and Topological Expanders

Abstract

Expander graphs have been intensively studied in the last four decades. In recent years a high dimensional theory of expanders has emerged, and several variants have been studied. Among them stand out coboundary expansion and topological expansion. It is known that for every $d$ there are unbounded degree simplicial complexes of dimension $d$ with these properties. However, a major open problem, formulated by Gromov, is whether bounded degree high dimensional expanders exist for $d \geq 2$. We present an explicit construction of bounded degree complexes of dimension $d=2$ which are topological expanders, thus answering Gromov's question in the affirmative. Conditional on a conjecture of Serre on the congruence subgroup property, infinite sub-family of these give also a family of bounded degree coboundary expanders. The main technical tools are new isoperimetric inequalities for Ramanujan Complexes. We prove linear size bounds on $F_2$ systolic invariants of these complexes, which seem to be the first linear $F_2$ systolic bounds. The expansion results are deduced from these isoperimetric inequalities.